Compress all tracks

[semaj23]

I am working on a soundtrack for a laser show and I have about 11 songs with varying degrees of clipping. Is there a way that I can bring all tracks to the same level without doing each individually.

Thanks

James

[Farview]

If you have wavelab, you use the montage and the meta-normalising function. It won't fix the clipping. If you don't have wavelab, maybe there is a find RMS level function that is iin cooledit. If you find the rms of every song you will know how much to turn down the loud ones to mach the other.

[rnb259]

since this is the cool edit forum, all you have to do is...

1. go to the edit view part of cool edit and then go to file (load up the songs/music that you want) then if you look you will see under edit group waveform normalize. That should help bring all the music to the same level of loudness..

2. you could always load up each track in the multi track view and put them all on the same track (one after another) then push the out button on that track and create a new bus with compression. It'll basically do the same as normalizing just less desrtuctive to the tracks. save the compressed tracks but don't save the session.

*Note- save the tracks as something else from their originals, that way if you don't like what you get you can always delete what you get and start over!

I hope that gives you a little help

[Farview]

If you use the normalize function you need to normalize it to an rms level, not peak normalizing. But because he he said that most of the songs are clipped, the normalizer in peak mode won't change anything. (if he normalized it to 0db)
I suppose since the tracks are clipped already, smashing them with a compressor might not mess them up any more than they already are. Once something is broken, how much more can you break it?
Sorry for posting in the Cool Edit forum, I was just running down the new posts and didn't realize I had stumbled someplace I didn't belong.

[dobro]

"Sorry for posting in the Cool Edit forum, I was just running down the new posts and didn't realize I had stumbled someplace I didn't belong."

Useful response. You belong.

[LRosario]

Farview's right about clipping though....


Once your songs are clipping, theres not much you can do short of getting them all down on wax from scratch....

[lpdeluxe]

Ah! You record to wax cylinders too!

[young mecca]

I use a sure rs25 mic connected to my sounblaster live soundcard. do you think i should use a compressor installed in aa1.5 as a real time effect to compress my vocal tracks or should i use it after vocals have been recorded?

just so u know i also have wavelab 3.0 and soundforge 6.0 installed as plugins.

[ozpeter]

For most purposes it's best to apply any processing after recording. Otherwise you might find you've got a great recording permanently messed up by the wrong processing.

Relevant subjects in the manual might be Dynamic Processing, Hard Limiting, and Group Waveform Normalise.