Hi Mark, and a special Happy New Year. You may be right that I'm not understanding the normalize process. I'm not really a technician. I marked the tracks for the entire program and normalized in and out. Overall, that lifted the audio levels to max, which is fine. Since many were recorded too low, just raising the gain didn't get me much compared to what normalize does. Are you saying I need to treat "unnormalized" clip separately? In most cases the non-normalized clips are too low compared to the rest of the segment, even from the same interview. A few are noticeably higher, again from the same interview, excerpted from only a few seconds apart. Is there a way to adjust the normalization clip by clip, rather than reverting to gain, which doesn't produce a high enough audio level?
Again, I appreciate your prompt and helpful response.
Jon
Are you sure you're using the tools correctly? Normalilze is a gain change to set the highest peak in a clip to a set level. That means that if your clip has a single sample at -0.1 dBFs, and you want to normalize the clip to 0 dBFs, you will effectively be changing the gain by +0.1 dBFs. It's worth analyzing your clip to see if there is any point where there's a peak that is significantly higher than the majority of the rest of the clip. Then you can see why normalizing isn't going to do anything.
It seems you may really just be in the market for a gain change. The gain change will increase the level of the clip by the amount you set. If there is a portion where audio clips at 0 dBFs, well, that portion is toast anyway, so adding more gain to it isn't likely to hurt since you probably aren't using that spot anyway.
