Good Morning! I have a audio preaching cd I’m editing for a radio broadcast. The pastor’s voice has high and low spots in it. I want to keep the audio at a -6db and make the audio wave smooth through out the audio to one level to prevent the listeners from having to turn their electronic devices up and down to hear. When I used Soundbooth CS5 I used Voice Leveler and Radio Leveler to make the wave smooth keeping it to one level throughout the cd.
I’ve recently upgraded to WL Pro 9.5. Where is the leveler found in WL 9.5? I’ve watched Greg Ondo videos but the video isn’t showing what I want to do.
Considering your other posts in addition to this, Normalizing is not going to help you automatically adjust continuously varying levels in a program, or at the very least it would be a horribly inefficient way to do it because it would require a lot of manual setup beforehand (visually splitting clips etc.), and the results would probably not be good. You could try compression and limiting, but it would probably make more sense to find a plugin that’s specialized for voice leveling.
To be a little more specific, normalizing a single long file to say -6 LUFs integrated target will only turn the whole file up or down to get a -6 average for the entire file, it won’t adjust high and low spots within the program at all to do what you want.
I actually don’t know if WaveLab has something like this or not but when I need to adjust a bunch of dialogue to have the same apparent level I use the Leveler module in iZotope RX. It works well for determining a target level and controlling how strict or relaxed you want the signal to adhere to that.
I work on the audio for a lot of short storytelling videos and the dialogue level is usually all over the place from different scenes and people and this works great.
It would be interesting to know if WaveLab has a similar feature. I know you can normalize an entire piece of audio but what the RX Leveler does is analyze the entire piece and automate the gain for you so it sits right.
If you don’t have RX or other specialist plugins, you could try MasterRig with two Compressors. Set Compressor A to a single frequency band set to Maximizer (Mix 100%, Optimize 50, Output -3dB) and Compressor B to a single frequency band set to Standard (Mix 100%, Threshold -23, Attack 1ms, Auto Release Active, Ratio 1.5, Output 0dB). The idea being that Compressor A pushes up quiet passages while Compressor B pushes down loud passages.
Or you could use he volume tools in Montage to manually adjust the levels. This is what I do for voice overs and audio books. Once you get the hang of it the process goes very quickly.
I think all of the suggestions above are good and worth trying. I didn’t know what Adobe Soundbooth was, but apparently the tools have been continued in Adobe Audition. (?)
If price is a consideration, Waves Vocal Rider or Melda Auto Volume plugins might be worth trying. I think Vocal Rider was originally made for isolated vocal tracks in a mix, but controls were added for spill and music in Vocal Rider with the Live component.
I could see the advantage of having a constant visual display of the whole corrected waveform like in Audition or RX Advanced, but I think they’re considerably more expensive. But the cost might be justified if you can use their other features. With the plugins, you could do temporary renders or Render In Place in Wavelab to display the same thing.
I don’t know for sure if Wavelab has anything comparable built in, something to automatically and continuously adjust levels in a recording that’s primarily voice, but I don’t think so.
Unrelated to this but an interesting use of the Waves Vocal Rider: Automatic Makeup Gain.
Waves vocal rider automatic makeup gain:
The one that is built into Wavelab’s Montage. Quick, easy and works well. Just put in a point on the level line then put in another point and move the level up or down. I believe you can go up or down 6 dB in level. If you have to do more than that there is something wrong with your voice recording. FWIW
To be more specific, each clip can have a volume (level) envelope that you can turn up or down for the entire clip, or draw precise automation if needed.
Check the Envelope Ribbon tab and make sure the Volume Envelope is showing. You can also choose if the envelope is before or after any Clip FX.
Also, in the Clips Tab, there is a way to manually enter a gain change. See screen shot.
Finally, you could use the Meta Normalizer in the montage to get all the clips in a montage set to the same loudness with a variety of variables and options. It’s not always perfect but it’s usually very close and you can fine tune by ear from there.
