Anyone who's seen my thread over in the SONAR forum knows I've been having some trouble with normalization.
 
What I wanted to do was select multiple clips in a track, run Normalize, and end up with results the same as if I had run Normalize on only one clip (i.e., find the loudest peak in the entire selection, determine how much to increase or decrease the audio by to meet a specified peak level, and adjust the selected audio accordingly). Unfortunately, the results came out all over the place, with varied, uneven amounts of adjustment applied.
 
You might think that running Normalize with multiple clips selected would raise or lower each clip individually to the specified peak level, but that doesn't happen either. To do that, you need to select each clip and run Normalize one at a time. So that's not already a pre-existing functionality.
 
I know this is a pretty specific case, so I don't know if many others would be on board, but it would sure be handy to me!
 
So once again, the request is for Normalize ran on multiple selected clips to find the peak amongst the entire selection and adjust everything just as if it were one big clip.

Haven't tried myself. What do you mean with "all over the place"? Did Sonar find the overall loudest peak of all clips and apply THAT necessary dB increase to all clips?

M@
Did Sonar find the overall loudest peak of all clips and apply THAT necessary dB increase to all clips?
 

 
No, that's what I would LIKE it to do. What it did do, however, is unclear. For instance, it would adjust one clip's gain by "X" percent, but then the very next clip would be adjusted by some other percentage. It adjusted the different clips' gains by varied amounts. That's what I meant by "all over the place". I want them to be adjusted by the same amount across the board, just as if they were one long clip.

Sounds like akward behaviour. Just to make sure i understand 100%:

Assuming of all selected clips the clip with loudest overall peak needs +3dB to reach the desired level of let's say -1dB......you'd want all selected clips to get the +3dB boost.

As opposed to each selected clip getting normalized to the desired level of -1dB.

-> Sonar did neither of the above??
I'm in bed with a little fever so I cannot get to my daw to do a test myself. As soon as I get to it I'll reply....or maybe someone else chimes in.
Cheers

M@
Sounds like akward behaviour. Just to make sure i understand 100%:

Assuming of all selected clips the clip with loudest overall peak needs +3dB to reach the desired level of let's say -1dB......you'd want all selected clips to get the +3dB boost.

As opposed to each selected clip getting normalized to the desired level of -1dB.

-> Sonar did neither of the above??
I'm in bed with a little fever so I cannot get to my daw to do a test myself. As soon as I get to it I'll reply....or maybe someone else chimes in.
Cheers

That's correct. Playing along with your example, Sonar neither adjusted all the clips by +3dB, nor did it make all the clips hit peaks of -1dB. It brought some of the clips up to -1dB; but where it boosted some clips by +3dB, it only boosted others by +2dB, or +1.7dB, or any other seemingly random amount, all in the same normalization pass.
 
Can you see now why the results made no sense to me, and why I'm requesting alternate behavior?
 
PS: Get well soon!

When I select all clips and normalize to -3dB, every clip will reach minus three.

This is useful for ensuring a good signal into effects.

When you have a Mic on each Tom, this can set them all to a similar volume and they may not have been played that way.

My solution is to loop a section where the toms are played and solo the overheads and then solo the Tom tracks and adjust the volumes until they are similar.

...

If I had a case where I had to normalize lots of clips as one, I would line then all up... shift+g to goto start of clip... Set markers at the clip boundaries, bounce to clips, normalize, split clips at markers and return them to original tracks.