How to 'level out' voice recordings?

[mol]

Hi! Today is just my second day with Audacity, and I really need a little help

How do I 'level out' differences in volume level between several voice recordings (speech)?

Is there some sort of automated 'lets level the average gain of these five tracks'-function, I have not discovered yet, or do I have to manually adjust the gain of each track?

Any kind of help is very much appreciated!
/mol

[ignatz]

I assume these are separate files? If so:

open file 1, go to effects menu, choose amplify, poke ok, and export the file.

Repeat for the other files.

That sets the max amplitude for all files at 0 DB. If you don't want 0 DB, enter something like -1 or -2 in the new peak amplitude box.

They WON"T play back at "the same volume" exactly, but it's a decent start. If you are more finicky after you listen to them, you can go back and adjust manually.

[mol]

Yes, they are separate files. And your sollution worked just fine - thanks

I read some pages about compressor, but are not sure how it really works in this matter - could compressor be helpfull for me too?

[ignatz]

Compression can help or it may not be worth the effort. You would have to experiment.

If you are just trying to get several spoken word passages to sound about equally loud when played back, it may be simpler to just evaluate the loudness as best you can before exporting.

Or save the files as waves, listen to them at your leisure later, make a note about which are "not loud enough", and then reopen those quieter files and readjust them manually.

But don't think of compression as a quick fix. If you experiment with it a while, you may want to try it--it's just a matter of which is the quickest way to get equal volume and I'm not sure compression is necessarily the answer.

If you had 100 files, compressing all of them might be a way to quickly get fairly close on volume, but you would still have some that are problematic.

[mol]

Thanks again for your help