Topic: Question About Normalizing With SoundForge or Wavelab

[Cactus]

hey now,  im not exactly sure which section to post this so i landed here, many apologies if its inapproprioate, but yes i had a few questions..

i just finished up my first show the other night and now im down to the editing, tracking etc .. i started out the show fairly hot, using a ua5 it clipped a few times with the drums so i backed it down a bit..soo now im here,  using soundforge , i load the wav and attempt to normalize to 0db,  well the wav normalizes but you can still see and hear the difference in volume .. so i tried a little db change on the latter half of the show and renormalized again and very similar results.. just curious if this is just pure ignorance or if there's something i can do??  my familiarity is that with normalizing the wav would change where necessary (raise or lower) to match the specified range (ie 0db)

peace and thanks to all
a little lost newbie
m

[F.O.Bean]

in sf, try normalizing the rms(average) of the wave instead of the peak, which is prolly 0db

[joemango]

...or you could use the graphic fade function to even out the levels before you normalize it.  

When you normalize to 0db(peak), you won't get much in the way of results if the early part of your recording is peaked out.  Normalize takes the entire wave into account.

Bean's suggestion is not bad either, but keep in mind that using RMS normalize can distort your music if not used with great care.  Again, it takes an RMS average over the whole wave, so you're likely to have the same problem even if you use RMS.

[pfife]

I taped a pretty quiet show the other day, and I just tossed it into Sound Forge, normalized RMS at -17.21db (13.79%) - sounds good!

hth.
~AP