just normalise all of themdgoldsmith wrote: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.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."
Normalize the ones I haven't.Because you intend to do something to one of the two sets? You're describing a poem that stops in the wrong place.
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.In Audacity, yes. After it has been exported as an audio file, then it depends on the file format.
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.)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.
Thanks!
DG
wont hurt to do it twice
much easier approach than trying to figure out which are what
and easier to use a db scale imho than linear