Normalize Audio Files in REAPER

[Music] hi i'm kenny joya welcome to another one of my tutorials in this video i'm going to show you how to normalize audio files in reaper now you're probably wondering what does normalizing actually do if we're dealing with a project like this where the audio file's level is pretty low it just brings it up as much as possible without clipping so bring up the volume like this just to about here where it doesn't clip the audio but it's as loud as possible now the few myths that go with normalizing our files one of them is that it changes the signal to noise ratio so if we look at this picture with the noise down over here and our signal up here if we normalize the file or bring up the gain all it does is bring up the signal and the noise together so it doesn't affect the signal to noise ratio if we have noise down here like air conditioning noise or hiss or preamp noise that noise can be brought up along with our signal our vocal or guitar so it's not going to make the noise any louder but it's also not going to make it any quieter so we don't improve the signal-to-noise ratio but we also don't make it worse we don't change it at all another myth about normalizing is that it affects the dynamics for example let's bring this up the dynamics of a file is just the difference between the loud sections and the quiet sections this one's louder medium and low and if we normalize it or bring it up it doesn't change the distance between them this is still loud this is still medium and this is still quiet so again it just makes the file louder it doesn't change the dynamics or the signal to noise ratio so why would we normalize our files well to be honest there's really no need to ever normalize our files we don't have to do it although personally i do find a use for it for one thing i like to work with larger waveforms like this so i can see them better if i want to remove some s sounds or p pops it makes it easier to see our waveforms although we can just change the visual if we want we go to the actions menu show action list and type in peaks right over here is an action to increase the peaks while we're viewing the game we can decrease them right here using the keyboard shortcut shift up or shift down hit shift up or hold it down and it makes it as big as you want or lower we shift down but this affects all the files together so if my snare track was all the way up like this let me use that keyboard shortcut to make the vocal look bigger it's going to make the snare look too big because it doesn't work separately with each file another big difference and again it's just for me personally is for mixing if we normalize all these files and go to the mixer i know if i'm mixing this project and i'll probably have the piano about down here with my vocal around here my snare about here and my kick right about here this is just from personal experience and if this is off in any way like my vocal is way up here i know something is wrong so by normalizing the files ahead of time i'll notice very quickly if something is wrong somewhere else but again that's just my personal opinion we don't really have to normalize our files but if we do let's take a look at how let's go back to the actions menu show action list and let's type in normalize and we can see right here we can normalize our items with this action and the keyboard shortcut on pc is ctrl shift n and a mac it's command shift n so if we select the vocal hit that keyboard shortcut it's going to normalize that file and again it brings it all the way up without clipping so if you want a bit of headroom you might want to bring this down just a bit grab it right here with the knob and bring it down just a few db to give us more headroom but that's just normalizing one file we could also do multiple files let's select all these files by marquee dragging them or just hit select all use the same keyboard shortcut to normalize all the items in our project and just like that each file is normalized and again if you want some headroom just bring them down just a little bit like this now we'll notice each file is brought up by a different amount the vocal is plus the snare is plus 11 and the kick is plus 12. so it's based on the volume of the individual audio file but if we want to normalize it with common gain all the same so undo this we use a different keyboard shortcut and why this is useful is for situations like this let's say we split the vocal here here here and here and if we normalize all the vocal files together let's double click the track it's going to individually normalize each item where it sounds like this right now baby baby notice this item is quieter than this one and the breath over here is even quieter than all of them but if we normalize it now it's going to bring all of them up based on their individual volume level so if we do it now watch what happens it does affect the dynamics because they're all normalized individually again if we don't want that behavior let's undo it instead we could choose this action normalize multiple items to common gain and this keyboard shortcut is just shift n so if we hit that instead shift n it normalizes it based on the lowest volume but it keeps them in proportion because the gain boosted about 19 db is the same on each file so it's not going to affect the dynamics it's just going to make it louder like this baby baby so this breath doesn't jump out as being too loud now you're probably noticing that i'm boosting the gain with this volume knob which doesn't show up by default but if we go to the preferences and scroll down to appearance media we can choose this button right here volume knob which i leave on to make it easier to adjust the volume right over here but again that's off by default now i should mention one other thing when it comes to normalizing our audio if you're using plugins that emulate hardware that are designed to see a very specific volume usually about minus 18 db you don't want to normalize all your files you can still do it but bring it down quite a bit to make sure you're hitting those plugins at the volume they prefer but that's only if using those plugins so that's pretty much it that's how to normalize audio files in reaper i hope you learned something hope you can use it and i'll see you next time thanks [Music] ah

Channel: REAPER Mania

Views: 29,792

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Id: 8G4o6B2SAE8

Length: 9min 8sec (548 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021