Waveform flatlines after Normalise

Audacity 3 Help Forum macOS
1

Hello

My Audacity (fully updated, macOS) recently began behaving strangely when I run Normalise. Doing so causes the waveform to flatline, see the screen recording.

It has only just started happening. I’ve been editing a number of recordings the last few weeks and Normalise worked as intended until the other day. Now it exhibits this behaviour on every WAV I try to normalise.

I haven’t changed any settings in Audacity and the files which I edit have all been recorded in the same way as poly WAV on my MixPre II. So there’s should be no difference between the files apart from the audio itself.

Does anyone know a solution to this issue? Thank you kindly in advance

Philip

2

There could be one sample in your audio which is extremely (+50dB) loud, (it could be hidden at the very start or end).

This one sample will cause normalization to attenuate your entire audio by ~50dB, i.e. almost flat-line.

[show clipping in waveform may reveal any such extreme off-the-scale samples ].

3

Or, running the Amplify effect can give you the current peak.

Amplify defaults to whatever change is needed for 0dB normalized peaks and it will show you before you apply (or cancel) the effect.

For example, if it defaults to +10dB your peaks are currently -10dB, etc. But the maximum change is +/-50dB so if it defaults to -50dB your peaks may be more than +50dB. That’s low enough that you can’t see the waveform but you should still hear something if you turn it up.

Or the “poly WAV” file may be corrupt or non-standard and Audacity is reading an invalid extremely high sample value.

Your recorder might support floating point (and Audacity works internally in floating point). The floating-point format can go WAY “louder” and WAY “quieter” than anything in the real-physical world.

4

This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.