My spouse complained that live recordings are 'just too quiet, then too loud'.
It seemed to me that for her car/work listening, she wants compressed and normalized waves. So I took a recording and compressed it in Audacity with default settings, compressed based on peaks checked.
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She loved it, so I shared with a few friends, who liked it more than the original.
On first listening, I didn't hear any substantial artifacts, though I need to take a listen on my reference AKG cans.
So, wondering about this in general, and whether others have used compression in their mastering workflow, either as a usual step or just for a show with crazy dynamic range.
I've attached screenshots of the original waves and then compressed version.
Thoughts?