Audacity Forum

dgoldsmith wrote:

I hope not. Undistorted audio goes from 0 dBFS and down. Not up. All negative numbers. Default Normalize and Amplify are both 0, not -1dB. You can change the value to anything including +1 by clicking on "Distortion is OK."

OK, I guess dB is the wrong unit; what is the unit of the ordinate (i.e., along the y-axis) when you load a track into the editing window, and the wave form is plotted between -1 and +1? What ever it is, that's what I'm referring to when I speak of normalize making the maximum amplitude + or -1.

Because you intend to do something to one of the two sets? You're describing a poem that stops in the wrong place.

Normalize the ones I haven't.

In Audacity, yes. After it has been exported as an audio file, then it depends on the file format.

That's why I marked my subject "SOT" (slightly off topic): I want to scan _wav_ files (not audacity files, and not using audacity, unless audacity can do that, which would be pleasant "news to me"; I thought I was pretty clear about what I wanted to do in my original post) to determine if they've been normalized.

A quick way in Audacity to see if a file has been normalized: Select the "Amplify" effect and if the track has been normalised to 0dB the Amplify effect will indicate an amplification amount of 0.0dB.

Can that be done programatically, e.g., using a chain? (I know I can do that manually, but I have tens of thousands of files I want to check - there's no way I'm checking 'em all "by hand"; if it turns out there's just no way to programatically sort them as I want, I'll just have to re-apply my normalize chain to everything - I just don't want to have to waste the time reapplying it to ones I've already applied it to if I can find some way not to.)

Thanks!

DG