Hello,
First of all I’m using Audacity 2.0.5 on Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
What I’m actually trying to do is just normalize the peaks of several M4A loss-less files. Or, in other words, amplify the waveform until the highest peak of each track is just under clipping. I want to do this because some of the songs in my music collection is just so much quieter than other songs.
Now I know how to do this by selecting the track, and then clicking effects > amplify > and then deselecting “Allow clipping”.
But the thing is, I was reading about the different effects than can be achieved by selecting different dithering options under " edit > preferences > quality " and the people were saying something about “square dithering” will add a tiny amount of noise to the completely silent (zero amplitude) portions of the track but will also help with harmonic distortion and dynamics.
I don’t want to do any of that. I don’t want to add any noise, improve dynamics, or help THD. I don’t want to “re dither” the songs, I just want to normalize the peaks by amplifying the waveforms without any sound quality degradation
My question is, what do I set the dithering options to if I don’t want to add or remove any noise or change the dynamics of anything. Just amplify the waveform. Also, I read that you can export the tracks to M4A loss-less by exporting to an external program by selecting "file > export selected > then choosing “external program” and then typing in ffmpeg -i - -acodec alac "%f. Will doing this using the command prompt affect sound quality or anything like that?
I just want to import M4A lossless, amplify without clipping, and then export M4A lossless without changing the waveform and without sound quality degradation.