Making volumes equal

[llin90]

Audacity 2.0.1, Windows 7

Hello,

I'm trying to create a .wav file ("C") by merging two songs ("A" and "B") with 30 seconds of silence in between both songs (which I added). The problem is that "A" was recorded at a higher volume than "B" so when I merge them and then play "C", the "A" part plays much higher than the "B" part... how can I make them both play at the same volume? (so that I don't have to adjust them in the middle of the file)

Been looking for answers.. Effect>Normalize but that doesn't seem to work.. any help would be greatly appreciated!

[kozikowski]

You killed yourself when you merged the songs. Both Amplify and Normalize work on the whole song. You'd be closer had you normalized each ahead of time.

However, you can drag-select each song on your timeline and apply Amplify or Normalize to each segment.

Please know that both of those tools are simple arithmetic tools. They don't pay any attention to loudness which is far more complicated. If you have one song that was commercially produced and you bought it from iTunes, it's never going to match the loudness of you or your band singing the same song into a microphone, even if you amplify and normalize all day long.

To get the loudness to work, you need to either boost the low one or reduce the loud one so they sound good to you. That's not an automatic tool. You have to use Amplify and pick reductions and boosts by hand and listen to what they do.

Koz

[mikethebass60]

When you are normalising are you selecting both songs (ie the complete file)?

Try selecting file A then normalising then select file B and noprmalise.

[kozikowski]

Audacity automatically selects the whole song if you do nothing. That's the default. That was a change from the old Audacity which would demand you select something at all times. It generated a terrific number of posts.

"How come I can't get the Equalizer to work?"

Koz

[llin90]

I tried both way and it made the file a little better, thank you!