Should You Be Normalizing Your Audio?

Thanks for the refresher on the subject and getting directly to the point.

Absolutely! There is no legitimate reason not to . . . normalize all audio to True Peak. I use -1dB. Then adjust levels. Why leave a wimpy or inconsistent level? It blows my mind that some major DAWs do not have a normalize feature.

Confused. One person says never use a gate, another says to use it. One says to normalize, one does not. Who do you go by?

When I edit audio in Audacity (like a song from my favorite band for example) can normalization be a good method to prevent clipping?

Thankyou for the help I have a question
Why do some vocals don’t want to normalize?

Good advice... I was normalizing all the time on my final mix file.

to be honest perfectly honest you should NOT be normalizing your audio in fact if your mic is setup perfectly it will AUTO NORMALIZE YOUR AUDIO. If you Flat Line you'll get noise even with a Noise Gate device or Iolator in fact Gain is what causes Noise if your equipment is setup right your volume should be around 70% with like a 10% gain boost ((Remember what I said about gain tho)) on your Line input Mic Channel 1/2 and your quality should match your recorder 192000 khz, 24 or 32 bit. If you see a Volume Wave in live recording with no hiss or buzz or noise than your good. If still problem with noise well I use a Pyle Noise Isolation DI Box. Works like a Charm...

ALEX...YOU GAVE US THE INFORMATION WE WANTED BACKWARDS....GIVE US THE ANSWER QUICKER THEN EXPOUND

A really good explaination of this tool with real cases presented. Thanks.

As an audience, I will like peak-normalisation as a secondary volume control knob to avoid getting shocked by sudden Loud spikes when watching a movie. Normalisation knob for the centre speaker for some movies with unintelligible dialogue and RMS-normalisation knob for the surround speakers. That's from my understanding of your explaination. Now I have to search for video playback software using a computer. Probably post-production video editing software...
I don't do production though.

well explained! subscribed! btw you look like serj tankian from SOAD :)

thank you random bald man

well-presented info. thank you.

Nothing about my audio is normal anyway

Thanks dude, i've been normalising my voice-over this whole time and it was definitely doing more damage then good!

This is by far the best and simplest advice i've heard on the subject. Thank you!

Nice video!

Situation: I want to make a more clear distinction between the writing process and mixing the song I wrote. Let's say I have a song with a variety of transients and ambience. I think of printing/bouncing all the ingredients of the song I am done writing with, so I make stems out of them to really start mixing. Should I normalize the audio when bouncing the stems? I understand this will throw off my mix balance I had during writing, but that's okay, I didn't start mixing at that point yet. Thoughts? :D

What is this LUFS and true peak?

Excellent tutorial, thanks...

Hey Alex, if you make a course for a million dollars it'll be totally worth it! Please make it affordable so we can access it when you do. I feel it coming, you rock!

Great video as usual. Quick question totally unrelated, what is the fader board you are using with your DAW and that we see in your back ground?

Thank you yet again, as i dive into this world of editing your information has been of amazing value.

Wanted to say thanks for the variety in terms of in depth and surface level content. These shorter videos are a bit easier for beginners like me to consume and learn before trying to really listen in on your longer content.

Great

I’m just starting out and your videos greatly helps !
I just need your opinion on Rode NTG-5 , as this is the mic I can afford at the moment . Is it any good in its range ?

The video I’m secretly waiting for you to make would be. A Rode videomic NTG using USB into final cut using the voiceover option and applying all types of stuff to make a dialogue sound good. I like using that option because it’s super quick in my basement studio.

These are so helpful!

Always learning from your videos!

thanks again for a great video, but I have a question to ask, every time I mount lav on someone I have clothes move rattle or some different destruction, is there a way to handle that except tape and is it a known issue or im just doing it terribly wrong?

This is good stuff. But I see a lot of tutorials using normalization for dialogues. Now I'm confused. Could you share your workflow on dialogue tracks . TIA

Excellent information - stuff that I would not have thought of! Learnt a lot, thanks.

I feel like once I had software with the option to normalize I used it often. These days it’s rare that I use it for the type of work I do.

Thank you, this clears up a lot for me!

Hi, Alex. I wonder what kind of a speaker stands youre using? Im looking for something thats not gonna take away all the space but bold at the same time.

Good stuff Bruh-bruh

Maaaaaannnn Alex, you are a life saver! I’ve been using normalize to -.01 DB on all my dialogue tracks 😭😭. Thanks for giving some clarity on what it does and best/worst use case!

Hey Alex, I can´t load any of the audio previews on your website. It always says "Unable to load file".

I'm a podcast editor and agree 100% with your best practices for normalization. What I like to do with dialogue tracks is loudness match them all to -23LUFS as part of a file prep process that also includes mouth de-clicking, and mild noise reduction using iZotope RX.

External .wav recording vs internal .aac camera recoreing in regards to audio quality and dynamic range if preamps and everything else is equal. Struggling with which to use, it's nice to not have to sync.

Please answer sir should we amplify first nd denoise later or denoise first and amplify later? I'm confused which gives better results?
Are there presets available for parametric equaliser I find it difficult to do tweak it manually