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.

[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.