volume leveling

I can't seem to find an answer on this in my reference materials but maybe I'm looking under the wrong subject headings.

If you cut and paste the best parts of several recordings into a single track, how do you make the volume of the various clips the same throughout so that it sounds like a continous recording?

The volume levels don't vary that much but you can hear a bit of an increase in some parts of the track and a slight drop in others.

You can use 'process>normalize', if that's an option in your program. According to MC, this will bring the volume of an entire track to the highest level in the track which doesn't clip. I've used it a couple times, so first, make sure it processes the entire track, not just 1 clip at a time, second, listen to it to see if it sounds okay to you before closing the project and you can't undo it.
Greg

Normalizing is a dangerous process to use as it can cause other ptoblems, adjust with envelopes and keep it clean.

Normalization takes a look at the peak levels and decides what it takes to raise that to the level you want, so ALL sound is raised, good and bad. So if you want to hit a decent level it may push some sound past the point where it should be causing an overall bad sound.

Proper use of compression and limiting can do the same without any bad results.

Very true Beag, but remember the presets are just a starting point, and in many instances not very good, the old adage is trust your ears!



Even if they are the size of collard leaves!

Even if they flop in the breeze when your head is outside the window?!

Thanks for the advice. I did more cutting and pasting and ended up with fewer clips, which solved the problem for the most part, but I need to try the envelopes now that I think I see how they work. I tried normalizing but I couldn't hear any difference. The slight variations still seemed to be there.