Compressing, normalizing and all that Jazz

  • Thread starter Thread starter Laura C
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Laura C

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Over the last couple of nights I've been reading some of the tutorials and am ready to venture out with a few questions.
Be forewarned, I'm a newbie.

What is the difference between compressing and normalizing? How do these two things play out in the recording process?
From what I can gather, compressing is not always a good thing. Why would you want or need to compress your music file -- simply to export it?
 
Normalizing is nothing more than applying gain/reduction to a track to raise/lower its overall level. It really is a questionable process because it can raise the noise floor, adds another digital generation to the track (possibly degrading the sound slightly), and really does nothing that a fader on a mixer doesn't already do. Pros seldom use it, novices tend to use it alot - mainly to get their tracks "hot" (closer to 0dBFS) -- problem with this thinking is that this process doesn't increase the resolution of the digital recording anyways (which would be the only reason to get digital tracks "hot" in the first place!) So it really is unnecessary.

Compression, on the other hand, has the potential to change the dynamic range of a track, and also to "color" the track by allow changes to the attack and decay of the sound.

Shailat wrote an excellent article which describes it in detail....
 
<<Normalizing is nothing more than applying gain/reduction to a track to raise/lower its overall level.

So If I recorded 10 tracks at different times and used different levels, If I was normalizing the collection I would just be making sure that when I pressed them onto a disc they were all at about the same volume level, right? It does make sense that one could just use the fader, as you said.

Thanks so much for the link on compression. I will read it!

Slowly but surely,
Laura C
 
No.... that's the other reason there's no advantage to normalizing -- it works only on the peaks and applies the level to the entire signal.

To balance tracks levels of 10 songs on a CD is something entirely different. The reason wfor this isn't intuituve, but has to do with the fact that our ears have a weighted frequency response, so that certain frequencies are more apparent than others.

The level of a song to our ears is dependant on the frequency content of the song (along with the overall track level), which means that it's not simply a matter of making all the song's peaks to hit 0 to make the songs sound similar in volume.

As a matter of fact, there is no process that can determine apparent loudness of a song - you HAVE to use your ears! Tools like compressors/limiters will allow you change the dynamics of a track and raise/lower apparent level by shaping the dynamics so as not to "blow the meters," yet still maintain a strong overall level.
 
In addition to Blue Bear's comments, which are right on the money as usual, I would mention that normalizing (in the traditional sense) does not increase the RMS to peak level of a song.

The RMS (you can think of this as the average level) will be raised with a compressor and/or limiter by lowering peaks above a certain level. Once the peaks have been lowered you can raise the entire level by that amount thereby increasing the overall volume via the compressor level instead of just normalizing it.

There is an art to doing this so that you don't kill the transients and just make a big pile of mush. It often requires the use of more than one type of compressor and limiter.

To help balance the levels of songs try using an RMS meter over the traditional peak level meters usually found in digital workstation software. You don't want to make everything the same level necessarily, it should be appropriate for the type of material.

Hope this gets you started, it's actually a very long topic ...
 
<<Hope this gets you started, it's actually a very long topic ...>>

Wow -- no kidding! I feel like a kid who's asking about the performance capacities of a Jaguar engine, when really she should just concentrate on learing to ride a bike. Problem is, I don't know what's over my head and inappropriate for this stage of my learning curve until I ask the question!

Thanks to both of you who responded.
 
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