2.0.5. Windows 7
I’m recording an hour long essay in parts and am halfway finished and don’t have the luxury of starting over; I have to go with what I got. Unfortunately, ignorantly, I’ve done the following to each part: noise removal (profile 1st then repeat noise removal), amplify (to the max for each without allowing clipping), compression, normalize (both of the latter effects I used the recommended setting). Once I complete the recording, how can I have the same audio level for all the parts, the same volume level? I also, once finished, plan to duplicate and do reverb, medium room. Thank you.
You don’t have to get the segments level. You have to get the transitions level.
How many segments do you have? Play the transitions and gently use the level slider to the left of the tracks and make it so the end of one and the beginning of the other are smooth. The first two you can do by adjusting either segment one or segment two. After that, you have to adjust only the new segment so as not to mess up old work. Be careful not to walk yourself into bad levels overall.
You can also use the envelope tool (white arrows and bent blue line) to trim just the transitions and leave the rest of the segment alone.
When you export the show, the corrections (as I understand it) get burned into the show.
Do you have all the segments one above the other so it’s easy to manage them?
Do Save a Project under different names several times during this so when the computer throws up blood, you don’t lose the show.
It’s also a good idea to Export each raw segment as its own WAV file. Then lock those up somewhere.
Koz
This seems a bit convoluted, but…
Audacity is great in that it honours the tags in an MP3 file.
Create MP3 files from all the raw segments you have.
Use an insane setting (320k) 'til the end. It’s easy to lower the bitrate later.
Load all the tracks into MP3Gain.
Do a track analysis and set the track gain to 93dB on all.
Then open each track in Audacity and immediately export it again. (Chains are your friend.)
This will give you all tracks @ 93dB, plus or minus .75dB. (This seems approximate-ish to my tone deaf ears.)
Load all the newly exported tracks into MP3Gain and do a track analysis of that lot.
You can now see how much louder or softer each track is from the mean, which is 93dB.
Back in Audacity you can tweak each NEW track up or down using ‘Effect/Amplify’.
Export to whatever format required.
I wouldn’t worry too much about compression,normalization, etc until all tracks are done and concactenated.
Cheers
Thank you so much for your prompt replies. I’m afraid what I’ve done is just pick up where I left off recording the essay without marking the segments as such, just append recording, so I don’t know the individual segments, or would only be able to make very rough guesses. You’re right, it’s the transitions that count, as I’ve found when recording songs. By ear I can go through the final product and, when I detect a change in sound level (also eyeing the size of the wave), I can adjust accordingly. I’d imagined there’d be a way to get the sound the same level throughout once I finished without the ‘earring it’, just select the whole track and do an adjusted effect, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I’d only add here that Audacity is simply incredible, especially when you take into account it’s open source, so if what I want it to do isn’t possible, no sweat; I can just learn to do it right when recording long files.
Now, for the next time, which will be a long poem, what is the best method to use, I mean, what should I do with each segment, only noise removal (since each time the noise profile would be slightly different), and once the whole thing is finished then do amplify and the ‘rest’? I like just append recording where I left off, but if that isn’t the best method, I am flexible enough to change, most times that is.