How to acheive the same volume on all of my commentaries?

[MrYorkiesWorld]

Hi guys,

I've searched this forum as well as looked up on Google but I just can't find a simple, step-by-step guide that I can understand.

My aim to to take recordings from my microphone which I intend to use in YouTube videos. Once recorded in premiere pro, I usually import the audio commentary to Audacity, remove the noise, use Bass and Treble to fine-tune the audio and then I'm left wondering how I can then make my audio the perfect volume, and be able to replicate the same method with all my audio clips to make them the same throughout all of my videos.

Obviously sometimes the volume of my audio in the commentaries may be a little quiet depending on how far away from the mic I speak, and sometimes might be a little louder. How can I edit this in audacity in a way that makes all audio clips the same volume throughout using just one method?

I know this may seem a bit of an obvious one, but as a video editor this has always been important to me and I'd really like to learn to use Audacity properly to achieve this.

Any tips?

Cheers,
Yorkie

[steve]

Ideally you would use exactly the same studio set-up every time. If necessary, write down which microphone you used, distance from mouth, where you sat, equipment settings ... every detail required to get the "studio" set-up the same each time.

Beyond that, it is mostly a matter of practice and experience to be able to hit the same vocal loudness, pitch and intensity on every recording.

[kozikowski]

It’s a really big deal to be wearing headphones during a voice performance. That goes a very long way to self-correcting your volume.

Hopefully, you’re using a mixer or microphone system that allows “zero latency” monitoring. You can’t listen to the computer to do this because of delay problems.

Koz

[Trebor]

What Steve & Koz said, plus use of the new & Improved LevelSpeech2 plugin ,
follwed by RMS Normalize, (rather than Audacity's Normalize which uses peak values, not RMS values)

[kozikowski]

It's not unusual to smack into peak problems when you start messing with volume.

The AudioBook process also uses RMS Normalize and for the same reason, but follows it up with Effect > Limiter to keep the tips of the blue waves from going higher than 100%.

http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 64&t=96103

ACX AudioBook has very strict rules for submission quality and use can use those tools for your work, even if you don't use the same settings.

Koz