Normalizing audio

Whenever I'm done with a recording in my sequencer, in my case, Cakewalk Sonar Studio Edition, I normalize the audio. Then I convert it to an MP3. Then if it's up to snuff, I upload it onto myspace.com.

I notice that on other people's myspace page, the audio is louder than my clips. Is there anything else I can do to make my clip hotter?

thank you,

Beakybird

Normalize can only do so much to raise the overall signal. You maybe should try to apply a small amount of compression first to the track so that when you normalize the overall track level everything will be brought up higher in level.

Normilizing is the wrongest thing to do, it should be the last resource for increasing volume.
As Nigel said, there is other procedures for that as compressing, limiting, maximizing.
Normilizing is the worst word a engineer can hear and its a nightmare.
Try to delete that word from vocabulary and the function from the software too.

Hi Nedim

If normalising is so bad, why is it that virtually every piece of hardware and software that processes audio (Including professional (Expensive) equipment) includes normalising as standard, and makes it as easy to access as possible? (It’s also usually the first item that pops up when you use any of the Process Wizards in software and/or hardware)

Also as far as I am aware, it does not alter anything, but just moves everything up to a higher level, and so is pretty neutral.

Curious

Bill

Well, I learned a lot so far.

I know about compression. I don't know how to use it. I guess I can just choose a preset that says "light." I don't know anything about limiting or maximizing. Is there anything on the web about treating a final mix?

Beakybird

Abacus, it does alter everything, there is a great deal of difference between Normilizing
and Maximizing/Limiting. For Normalize to work properly the audio material has to be pretty
even since normilizing brings everything up, the picks and the noise while maximizing is a
whole different procedure, lets not bring up details about it cuz its a way complex and lost
topic, it took me 4 years of college to understand just a little of it. Normalizing exist everywhere
but its still the last resource to be used if you have nothing else to use. Any process alters audio,
even maximizing/limiting but it all deppends on how they alter it. When i was at college
(Audio Engineering, Mixing/Mastering) the engineers/teachers always tought us to try to avoid
as much as we can, some reasons i understood some i didnt, its complex.
There is also a lot of mathematics involved in it too, as what Compression does vs Limiting or
what Normalizing does vs Maximizing and e tc. An example:
A Maximizer brings up the low level and the high level together to a point you define and wont
let it peak, it will crush it down while Normalizing will bring everything up, Noise, LowLevel and
also Peak which will go way over 0db while a Compressor can raise the low level and crush the
high level and on the other hand the Limiter wont just let the sound go after a point you define.
A Limiter is basically a compressor, nothing else, just with infinite Ratio.
And they dont do only that, they can do other things too, deppends on settings.

It has been my understanding Normalizing is a glorified Volume control. The Waves L1 and L2 do a much better job although tey reduce the Dynamic range of the material and can be overdone real easy. But today that doesn't seem to matter. L O U D limited Dynamic range is the rule. LOL

The important thing is to make all the tracks the same levels and relatively same EQ. The Waves Maximizer Stuff and a little program called T-Racks are good programs which do well for home use. Today's software goes a long way to doing what years ago could ONLY be done by a mastering engineer.

For most homegrown "sell at the gig" CDs it's good enough. If you have a commercial release you will or should have the budget to hire a respected Mastering engineer. Not some guy who advertises in the back of Recording magazine who has T-Racks and Waves

Listen to these samples to understand what even a home SW Mastering progam can accomplish
http://www.ikmultimedia.com/t-racks/audiodemo/
Print this and study it...
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug04/articles/computermastering.htm

[This message has been edited by Kingfrog (edited 04-13-2009).]

If you use peak normalization rather than RMS normalization, all you are doing is just bringing up everything equally. Just like turning up the volume. If you use RMS normalization, you're actually changing the dynamics of the original source. Here is an explanation from a list I'm on, though he's talking about orchestral music, the ideas still apply.

I'm back. I just thought I should have probably better explained the
difference between peak and RMS levels. As I said, the peak is the highest
single level in a file. But due to the potentially transient nature of
peaks, they can be quite misleading. For instance, You may have a piece
wherein the highest relative peak is actually something like -4 dB. But, and
here's where it gets tricky. At the end of your symphonic piece you may have
a crescendo which ends with a burst of sound from the entire orchestra. So
that and only that one single peak time may hit 0 or close to it. Analyzing
this can reveal what you have to do; compress or limit that peak to get a
more realistic read on the file. So let's say you compress just that last
measure down to a -2 dB peak. Now you've got 2 dB more headroom to work
with. This in turn gives you 2 dB more of the perceived volume (RMS) you can
raise before the compressor kicks in to protect against overloads. And as
long as it's not too severe, you won't get the perception of squashed
dynamics.

In other words, you can look at the stat's of two files, both having a peak
of 0 dB. But one having an RMS of -21 and the other having an RMS of -18 dB.
So if done right, you can have your cake and eat it too.

I ordered M Audio Ozone 4
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/iZotopeOzone4.html

As it is reasonably priced, and it looks like it has a lot of features. I hope it's not too complicated.

Beakybird

A pretty easy to use mastering app is T-Racks...

T Racks is pretty expensive as is Planet Waves. This Izone is $200. It must be better than what I'm doing, which is just normalizing.

Beakybird

T-Racks cost less then ONE professional Mastering session....And they have a $199 version which costs far less.

Thank you to everyone! I will do some research to see which software is better: T Racks Standard or Izotope Ozone 4.

Beakybird

Izotope Ozone is a great application, very professional...on the other side TRacks is
great too but everyone loves TRacks cuz it
sounds warmer, more analogish, vintage while
Ozone is more synthetic, like Waves.
To experience that difference a person needs
to monitor on a really good monitors, you
cant expect to hear a difference on computer monitors.

I used to use T-Racks before I moved on to the UAD Mastering Tools, or our Manley Massive Passive, Slam! and Hardware L2 at the studio...

I thought it was a very easy to use mastering program, hard to f*ck up if you kept with the 'gentle' presets and worked from there. For what you need to do, Beaky, I think it's a pretty easy to use tool. There might be a BIT cheaper, but I'm not sure there are many easier to use. I have mastered dozens of CD's for other people, studios, etc.. If you haven't got decent studio monitors, you are taking a chance doing this on lesser speakers, but if you use the 'gentle' presets in T-Racks, it's fairly easy to get a good result sort of 'blind'

It sure makes for an easy volume pump for demos to post here, etc..

OK. It sounds like T-Racks is a proven product. I saw some lackluster reviews for Ozone 3 at Musiciansfriend. Now they have Ozone 4 which they claim is more user friendly. Ozone 4 has more toys than T-Racks Standard that costs the same price: $199. It has Harmonic Exciter, Multiband Dynamics, Stereo Imaging.

It's going to be a tough decision.

I'm sure you guys who are lauding T-Racks had a more comprehensive version, probably one that costs $400-500.

I think I'm leading towards the Ozone, but I hate buying the wrong software as you can't return it. You often cannot even resell it on Ebay.

Beakybird

http://www.acoustica.com/mixcraft/

The Mixcraft looks like an amazing buy. It looks like its raison d'etre is multitrack recording, kind of like Sonar, which I already have (Sonar 7 Studio Edition) which cost me over $200 and doesn't look that much better than this Mixcraft.

However, neither Sonar nor Mixcraft seem to have tools for mastering a mix like some of the other products mentioned in this thread.

Beakybird

Beaky what are you actually trying to do & achieve.?
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=mixcraft+4&aq=f


here is some Mixcraft demos

[This message has been edited by Dnj (edited 04-14-2009).]

if you're looking to just bring up the volumes of your mixes a little bit using some basic compression for website demos, just use something dirt cheap like goldwave. For quick and dirty I often just maximize volume, and then compress peaks at -6 Db, and re-maximize. You don't need to become a professional mastering engineer for what you're trying to do.

I'm going to buy the Ozone 4. Since my wife is a student, we can get the educational version which is $125.

My tech at Sweetwater told me that Ozone 4 has a feature that it can analyze the effects like compression levels and whatnot on a CD of your choosing, and apply those effects to your mix! If that's true, then it sounds too good to be true.

DNJ: I'd like to make a really high quality demo to impress people in the industry, and to have high quality material at my website. The Mixcraft software sounds comparable to Cakewalk Sonar which doesn't have mastering effects like limiters and maximizers.

For me, $125 is affordable, and I think it will improve my mixes substantially.

Beakybird

Good luck Larry hope you do well.

I used Sound Forge on my first demos a few years ago. It took me awhile to learn, some trial and error whether to choose the peak value or the RMS and then scanning the song and diddling around a lot with things like dithering I think it was called.
http://ScottLMusic.com/Listen

A few months ago I was putting up some demos of me and Chuck. I tried Sound Forge again and it was hit and miss again. I guess with some effort I would have gotten it under control again, but I didn't want to put in a bunch of time doing it. Hoping I'd find a quick fix I did. I used Audacity a free recording software with all the plug-ins a guy should need. It has only a couple choices for normalizing, so I checked the appropriat box and normalized all the tunes. To me they all came out pretty good except a couple which I manually set the volume control in Sound Forge, I think it was.
http://ScottLMusic.com/Chuck_Wheeler

The problem with this normalizing is it depends on all the factors in each recording. If they are done with a similar setting and sounds etc it is easy to do and fine. But when you've got something different going on like when I did Take The A Train as a big band number with no vocals, the peaks are different.

MP3 Gain is another free program that will normalize mp3's only and it takes into account that some songs are perceived as loud or softer when in fact the waveforms tell you something else. I know DJ's like to use this on their thousands of mp3's.

I'd sure try the free approach first myself

Scott

Mastering isn't really rocket science, unless you are trying to rescue a bad recording and mix.

As long as you concentrate on making the mix sound as good and well balanced as you possibly can, it's generally a piece of cake to bring up it's average level to close to contemporary standards (although some of the hottest of the hot levels can be a problem, but who wants to sound THAT loud, anyway? ).

Spend most of your time and effort there first, and the mastering will take care of itself.

Don't forget, also, that most MP3 library players (iTunes, etc.) have functions which average out the levels of different MP3's, so you don't need to crush your recording to death to make it loud. The whole 'volume wars' thing that is going on right now was an effort by marketing people in the industry to make sure that their CD's (NOT mp3's) jump out from a pile of other CD's when played quickly by a radio station programmer (louder is, generally, perceived as better, up to a point).

The trouble is, of course, that first, the radio station's broadcast compressors won't let it get loud on air, and your average music listener nowadays takes the CD home, and immediately converts it to MP3's in their iTunes library and rarely ever even PLAYS the damn CD! Whereupon, the iTunes software turns it down a bit to match all the other tracks, and you have lost whatever dubious gain you might have got, crushing the dynamics in the first place

Hopefully, sanity will return to the industry in the light of this trend, and we can go back to music that actually USES a fair bit of standard CD's dynamic range of about 96db, rather than squeezing it down to the paltry few that most modern label releases use...

Anyway, I'm glad I started this thread, because I didn't know a thing about any of this mastering stuff. All I knew was normalizing. I didn't think it got any louder than that. It will be interesting to play with some of the other toys that come with the Ozone 4 just to see what they do.

Thanks to everyone who enlightened me.

Beakybird

I use Nero WaveEditor, part of the Nero8 Suite. Works fine for me. Just my 2 cents worth...