normalizing

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daveblue222

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what does normalizing do to the selected track/s in cubase?
 
In a nutshell:

It finds the highest peak in your track and increases the volume of the entire track so that this peak is at a given level (usually too high)
 
daveblue222 said:
so why do people do nomalize tracks?


thanks
Click to expand...
Good question. I'm just a newb, but the only real reason I can think of is to correct a track that was recorded at a low level.
 
daveblue222 said:
so why do people do nomalize tracks?


thanks
Click to expand...
Mostly you don't.
I figure it's partly a name thing. If it was called 'Abnormalize there wouldn't be this inclination to think it it's something you'd normaly do.
 
Joepie said:
In a nutshell:

It finds the highest peak in your track and increases the volume of the entire track so that this peak is at a given level (usually too high)
Click to expand...
That is the nut of it. Look at it like this. In it's simplest application it takes your wildest stray peak and uses it to set some kind of norm' for the track?
In the case where you've already controlled the peaks with a limiter, then the limiter would already have been set to -.3fs (or whatever) anyway.
Done. In a word; Redundant.
 
normalizing is just an automatic volume knob. All it does is raise the audio in relation to the highest peak. You'd get the same thing if you just pushed up the fader. However, this isn't always a good thing. If you even have one transient that is at -.1dBFS and the rest of the audio is around -18dBFS, and you want to normalize it to -.01dBFS....your audio is just going to increase by .09dBFS. In other words, you won't notice any difference.

Your best bet is to compress/limit the peaks and turn up the volume afterwards.
 
daveblue222 said:
so why do people do nomalize tracks?


thanks
Click to expand...
...because they want to be sure they're getting value for money from all those bits they paid for. Some people hate to think that they're not using all the available bits. :)

Seriously, many people don't bother with normalizing. On occasions it can be useful but really you should conciously choose the loudness of a track and a fader and/or limiter can do a much better job.

The only practical purpose I can see would be to bring a too-quiet track up so that it's in a more usable region of the track fader but then it's likely to go too far and you'll end up with the fader down too low when you're trying to mix so I'd favour doing a fader-ride bounce instead.
 
I don't see a point in normalizing an individual track, you can always control the volume (indestructively) by using the faders.

I usually normalize on the final mixdown right before dither because of my lack of skills with a compressor/limiter.

I'll tame the peaks with volume envelopes and then normalize it. :o
 
There are plugins that do RMS normalizing too.

The rest of us just use a compressor! ;)
 
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