Leveling music?

F

firehawk

Veteran
I used my new zoom recorder at a dance recital and at the start of each song it blasts the audio and then quickly brings the level down so I have a bunch of loud spikes in my recording. Is there an easy way to bring down all those spikes without having to manually lower each?
I have Audition CS5, CS6, Soundbooth and Sony Sound Forge and Catalyst.
 
It's not really best practice but you could throw on a limiter set to 0db and raise levels to just under 0db. The loud spikes will be limited (and you will get some compression) but it won't clip and the other audio will fall in line. You can do this right in premiere using the dynamics filter.
 
firehawk said:
I used my new zoom recorder at a dance recital and at the start of each song it blasts the audio and then quickly brings the level down so I have a bunch of loud spikes in my recording.
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Did you have your recorder set to "auto" or manual recording levels ?

Usually "auto" recording levels are the worst when it comes to any kind of volume transitions, which is why professionals will only use fully manual recording levels.

firehawk said:
Is there an easy way to bring down all those spikes without having to manually lower each?
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I use "WAV Hammer" in Sony Sound Forge to compress the audio spikes in an audio track. Usually something like 8:1 compression for any audio above a set dB level. So it could be something like compress any audio above -12 dB by 8:1, and I might apply it several times to get all of the audio spikes down to where they should be. Once you have things to where you like them, you can then apply an overall volume boost to bring the entire track up to where you want your finished audio levels to be. So if you've compressed your tracks down to -12 dB and you want your finished audio to be -6 dB, then you can add 6 dB volume boost to bring your tracks to the volume you are after.
 
Thank you, TheDingo, David and egproductions.

I will try what was mentioned.

Yes. I know auto is bad. :) I set the zoom to auto because my guy that was supposed to be there way early and set up decided not to do what what he was told. I was over-seeing two recitals that overlapped so when I got to the 2nd I couldn't do a proper test. My Sony recorders don't have the violent spike issue the Zoom has but they were tied up.
Rather than risk guessing a manual level that might clip and be unusable I did the auto setting so now I have a problem, but at least it's a fixable problem. I certainly want to get it right next time.
 
Depending on which Zoom recorder you were using ( the new H5 and H6 have better noise-floors than the popular H4n recorder ), you can set your manual recording level to -20 dB which combined with a built-in limiter will handle most loud sounds and still give you almost 60 dB of dynamic range in your recording. ( noise-floors on the newer low cost recorders is usually around -75 to -80 dB )
 
TheDingo said:
Yeah, I use it quite a bit to compress the dynamic range of my audio tracks so that the finished audio will play well on crappy computer/laptop speakers.
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That's a great idea and will save me time fiddling with audio in the future for those crappy computer/laptop destined projects.
Thank you!
 
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