What is Normalizing - Creating Tracks

Today we take a look at audio normalization, explain what it is and provide you with some helpful tips and insights relating to how you can use it successfully in your own projects. Audio normalization is often misunderstood and even misused, so we wanted to take a little time to clearly explain the basics and provide some tips to help you put it to good use in your own music productions. We chose a very quiet field recording from a public library to show how much improvement audio normalizing can provide even when applied with a 'softer hand' when compared to the basic default settings. Our audio clip was downloaded from freesound.org, which is a great online community and destination for those looking for a place to swap and share sounds and recordings freely. Audio normalization can be both largely beneficial and incredibly destructive, so understanding how it works and how best to apply it for the task at hand is essential for successful results. I normally advise people to make sure you have your audio files that you will be using in your music productions saved to a folder outside of your actual DAW project folder to avoid any unwanted damage, as audio normalization is a destructive process. Simply put, audio normalization takes the overall volume level (dB) of an audio file and increases it (in dB) so that the highest peak is aligned with the volume limit set in the parameter settings. So, in this case, our audio file has its highest peak hit the -15dB mark and the entire audio file would be increased in volume by 15dB if the volume limit is set to 0dB. This means that the dynamic range is protected. But we want to avoid increasing the volume too much and risk causing clipping issues once it is incorporated into our mix. Therefore, we recommend allowing for some headroom and setting the volume limit to something less than 0dB. As is often the case in music production, less is more! Leaving yourself some headroom to work with means that you now can process this audio file any way you like and not constantly bump up against the clipping threshold as you work. You can still increase the perceived volume of the audio file in question by applying some subtle saturation or compression. You can freely shape the audio with an EQ without having to worry about accenting any frequencies, which would have resulted in clipping had it been normalized to 0dB.