Pughbert said:
The reason i was suprised that people think it a useless tool is simply that at collage ive always been taught to normalize. And this is advice from industry professionals who have worked with big bands, having produced top ten albums.
I not saying there word is final!, but it just suprised me people dont use it.
That is very interesting, because I have yet to talk to or read the words of "an industry professional" who thinks that normalizing is a good idea - until now.
But even if you take "the pro's opinions" out of the equation and just intrinsically look at what normalizing actually does, it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense because the noramlization process doen't actually do anything that is of important relation to the musical content that isn't already done - either directly or as a side efect - by other more straightforward processes.
The fist thing I think needs to be made clear in this conversation is to whether you're referring to peak normalization or RMS normalization, which do two different things.
If it's peak normalization, then - as you inferred - the dynamics on your tracks had better be damn near identical to each other for the peak normalization to be of any use whatsoever. Yes, I know you say that your songs have similar dynamics, but I'd find the actual peak and RMS measurements before you normalize interesting to look at. If the dynamic range between the peak level and the RMS level for each song are evn a couple of dB off, then normalizing may increase the overall volume of each song, but it will do nothing to even the RMS levels out between them.
If it's RMS normalization, then you gotta either be careful of clipping the peaks, or use a normalizer that allows you to force hard limiting somewhere below saturation to avois the clipping. But if you do that, there really is no difference between that process and the one of thowing a hard limiter at the song and then boosting the gain. If you use RMS normalization with a brick wall option like that, yoiu are going to wind up perhaps normalizing the RMS between songs, but you will be also paying the price of coloration that comes withthe brick wall procedure. If that coloring is OK with you, then that's fine. But then the question will still remain, why not use a quality limiter (outboard or plug) with a better sound rather than depend on the normalizer to do such a crucial process?
G.