Normalize not working

[ojrchencheno]

I tried using Audacity to edit the songs in an album to be the same. I used the normalize feature but after I exported the songs back, it did not seem to work.

[steve]

The Normalize effect is often misunderstood. What it does is to "normalize" to a given peak level. That is; it will amplify or attenuate (negative amplification) the audio so that the absolute maximum peak reaches a specified level.

Note that these two tracks are both normalized to 0 dB (full scale). Overall, the second track will sound much louder than the first. Most of the first track is at a much lower level than the second track, but notice that there is a spike (pointing down), which gives the first track an absolute maximum peak level of 0 dB ("absolute peaks" may point up or down).

tracks000.png (24.11 KiB) Viewed 241 times

I'm guessing that what you are trying to do, is to make all of the tracks sound the same 'loudness'. The best way to do that, if available on your media player, is to use "ReplayGain" (see: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=ReplayGain). iPods, iTunes, and other Apple products have a similar feature that they call "SoundCheck" (see: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201724).

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