Audacity won't let me normalize

[laurie-ky.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to finish up my last podfic for the amplificathon contest -- which is over tonight -- and I'm having trouble with Audacity not letting me normalize the first part of the story, which is edited and is 66KB. It started acting a little strange at the end of editing last night, when it wouldn't let me cut a long stretch, so I had to cut, like 1 minute at a time. It started to let me normalize by doing the same thing - just one minute at time, which was going to take forever but I was willing to do it, but now it just keeps closing me down. Sigh. I only got 1 minute in.

I just now tried to normalize the second part -- about 50 minutes -- and it worked just fine. (Thank God).

Any ideas on how to fix this? I do not have any other programs running tonight, I did last night.

Posting this at Amplificathon and podfic tips.

Laurie

Comments

[cybel]

I'm on a Mac, so this is just a general comment.

I find that sometimes programs get wonky if they're left open for a long time. It may help to close the program then reopen it. If this doesn't do it, you could try shutting down then restarting your computer.

The only other general things I could suggest would be to delete preferences (or whatever the PC equivalent is and/or reinstall Audacity if it continues to act up. Oh, and, of course, make sure you have the most up to date version of the software.

Probably no help, but there you go.

[laurie-ky.livejournal.com]

I've had to shut down the program a number of times - it's shutting it down for me, but I restarted the computer and I've still got the same problem. I did three other podfics yesterday and didn't have the problems I'm having with this one, plus I finished editing part two and normalilzed it fine tonight. So, I don't think its a problem with the software - just something wrong with this track. I even copied the track into a new project but I still had the same problem with it.
Thanks for giving it a try. One thing that happened that might explain the glitch is that the power went out while I was working on it -- maybe that fucked it up. I also had mutiple tracks because I had to re-record some stuff when the power went out.

Laurie

[cybel]

Ah, I can see where that might be the problem. Hope it all works out.

[darsynia.livejournal.com]

I just had this problem, and after an hour and a half on google I found out what happened.

It won't normalize when there's a spike in one of the tracks that will distort if it's normalized. The way to get around this is to normalize around the spike, amplify it into the negative, or pick a loudness value in amplify and highlight each track to do it by hand.

[laurie-ky.livejournal.com]

I tried to avoid where I was getting kicked out and normalize the rest of it and the weird -er thing that happened was that I could normalize the last 30 seconds of the track and then when I tried to do more it wouldn't work. The last 30 seconds was lower than the rest of the track and it pushed it up a bit.

could you explain more how to do the other two suggestions. I've tried some things but they didn't work.

Laurie

[laurie-ky.livejournal.com]

I googled also, after reading your comment, and I tried to adjust amplify but the progam kicked me out and shut down. At least it did let me make an mp3 of it. Shoot. Oh, well. I'm wondering if because the power went off while I was recording, if that fucked it up. Thanks for your help.
Laurie

[darsynia.livejournal.com]

I had that problem today with 'Generate Silence;' I think sometimes Audacity just has hissy fits and needs to calm down. My solution was to do something, save it, close it, open it back up, do something else... for about five minutes and then tentatively try to do things for a bit more time in between. So, as frustrating as it is, I don't think it's necessarily the specific action you're taking, but more that the program is sometimes unstable.

So, to explain the last two options I mentioned:

To normalize the whole thing, you pretty much have to find the most extreme sound spike and tone it down a bit, so that when you do normalize, it sounds good. The program's basically built to prevent you from doing something that won't sound good, essentially. The 'Amplify' feature has a slider that can go into the negative, which de-amplifies. One good thing to know about Amplify is that it automatically sets itself to the absolute loudest you can set the section you've highlighted. That's why, say, if you highlighted a very soft section and hit Amplify, the slider might be on 17.3, whereas if you highlight something very loud, it might grey out any higher than 3.0.

I think if you lower the extremes in your clips, you should be able to go back and normalize the whole thing in one fell swoop, as they say--but if you keep getting the problem where it just... doesn't DO the whole thing (which is more annoying than getting errors, in my opinion!), you can do the normalizing yourself.

You said some of your file was already normalized? I had this happen to me and here's what I did, though you can choose to do this from scratch if you want (will explain that after, so as not to be confusing):

Work on the clip directly after the section that did get normalized, so you can easily compare the loudness. Then, try to pick an amplify setting for the softer clip that sounds as close to the loudness of the already louder part. Once you find the magic setting, you can apply that same setting to the rest of the clips (in the effects menu, the top option would be 'repeat amplify' which applies the same setting to the highlighted clip--much easier to deal with). If you get to a clip that won't let you go high enough to amplify it to your setting (the 'ok' button greys out), look/listen through it for a particularly loud sound spike. Try to 'de-amplify' it to be more balanced with the rest of the clip, and then go ahead and select the setting via the regular 'amplify' option (because if you de-amplify, it'll remember THAT setting instead of your other one, I hope I'm not too confusing!).

I can sometimes explain things really well--and sometimes not. I'm heading to bed soon but if anything is confusing do tell me and I'll try to be more clear.

[laurie-ky.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this all out. I had to post it the way it was for the contest, but I saved the .aup file and I'll keep trying to fix it.
Laurie

[darsynia.livejournal.com]

I was very pleased to do it--I really wished I'd had someone to tell me all that when I hit the similar snag, as I was, erm... kind of angry at the time. Heh. Hopefully the sound differential wasn't too large!

[laurie-ky.livejournal.com]

I did the amplify down thing and I could see the spike being reduced , although, my god, that's slow, but after I did it about three times -- the program started kicking me out again. It didin't seem to matter where I tried to lower the spikes. I don't think it sounds too off for part one so I am officially waving the white flag at Audacity. But I learned more about how the program works and for that I thank you.
Laurie