Topic: n00b question: How do I normalize / up volume in Adobe Audition?

[ljsurfer2002]

I had been using soundforge for years now, but recently a friend of mine discovered this cyclical high pitch noise that was appearing on my nomad recordings. I should post a thread looking into that later, but for now, he made an adobe audition filter to remove it. Only catch is that I now have to use Audition to edit my shows. I'm totally lost here. I don't edit much of the wav file to begin with, but i'm just lost... what can I do to accurately increase the overall sound of the show? (it was a quiet coffee shop performance). Normally I just highlight a representative section, normalize it to 0 and if that looks good, undo and highlight the entire show and do the same thing again and fade the in and out and then save. is there a better way for me to be doing this? It is crude I know, but I don't know of anything better. I figure with 5 years of taping and converting shows I should know better, but it's seemed to work so far. I just thought with this new program, i'd try to at least learn to do a few new tricks..

thanks in advance.

[ShawnF]

I have CEPro2.0, so I'm just going to assume that all this still works the same in Audition . . .

There are a couple of ways to accomplish this.  You could load the entire file, double click in the waveform to select it all (or do it manually) and then do Effects/Amplitude/Normalize.  I think you're really not supposed to normalize to 0 (isn't -.3db supposed to be the CD standard?), so maybe choose 99% instead of 100.  That will take a while to calculate, though, so I don't think it's the fastest way to accomplish what you want to do, but it is the easiest, AFAIK.

What I would suggest to make it go faster would be to highlight the loudest portion of the concert--doesn't have to be a very long segment at all, just be confident that nothing else is louder than what you're picking.  Then do Effects/Amplitude/Amplify.  At the bottom of the dialog box, there's a "Calculate normalization values"--set the peak where you want it (say, -.3) and press Calculate Now.  The Amplify slider at the top of the box will move and you'll see the value of what it would take to normalize that portion of the show to whatever you set as the peak.  Close the dialog box (don't press OK), select the entire show (double-click in the waveform while the entire file is showing), then go back to Effects/Amplitude/Amplify.  If you Closed the box previously and didn't Cancel, the same value should still be showing next to the Amplify slider, or just type it in, and press OK.  This way you've figured out what you've needed to normalize the loudest portion of your show with a minimum of calculation time and can quickly apply to the entire file and be sure nothing will clip.

If there's applause that is louder than any of the music, you might want to select the loudest music segment rather than the applause to determine the normalization value.  Clipping the applause usually isn't a big problem unless you're really overdoing it, and this way you are, in effect, bringing the level of the applause down with respect to the level of the music.  Just be sure you like the results, though.

One other note--for making this kind of alteration to your file, I think most people believe that converting it to 32 bit float format first and then dithering back to 16 bits after you're done with all of your editing will yield better results than editing it in 16 bits.