- In this video,
I'll show you how to get a consistent volume level
between multiple voice tracks inside Audacity.
(logo whooshing)
Okay, so here's a common problem.
You've got one voice track, two voice tracks, three,
or maybe, in this case, 15 voice tracks,
all recorded at different volume levels
with different speakers.
Some speaking louder, some quieter.
How do you get those tracks consistent in volume?
I'm gonna give you some easy answers here.
So we're in Audacity.
Thank you to David Hunter for sending me the files
and giving me permission to use them in a video.
So you'll see, this is Audacity with 15 tracks
all over the place.
Now, what I did, first of all,
before I even started this video,
is I went to Tracks,
and I went to Mix, and Mix Stereo Down to Mono.
So I'm only working with mono tracks now.
Otherwise, I just see double the track.
And this is a radio drama.
It's mono, it's voice anyway, so that's fine for me.
Now I'm gonna go ahead and listen to this voice track,
voice track 1 up here.
(voice track mumbling)
And we're sort of around -30, perhaps even lower.
Then we'll listen to track 2.
That's up at -18.
You can see this is a levels issue here, can't you?
And we'll go over here, listen to this.
- [Voice Track] Best for the twins, of course.
- -24 to -18, which is wonderful.
Let's go to this one down here.
- [Voice Track] Now Harriet, you put your feet--
- Between -12 and -24.
So everything's all over the place.
Volume level is inconsistent.
This is not a good experience for your listeners.
So how do we sort this out?
Actually, quite easily.
So I'm gonna hit Control+A or Command+A if I'm on a Mac,
and that's gonna select every single track.
'Cause we wanna work this through on every track,
we don't want to go through individually
and make volume changes and envelopes and all that stuff.
We want something automated and easy.
So now I'll go into the Effect menu of Audacity.
I'll look under Volume and Compression.
And there's this really cool feature
that I really highly recommend you use,
it's called Loudness Normalization.
Now, the good news about using this effect
is it doesn't change any of the audio
you've already recorded.
So there's no compression going on,
there's no volume level changes to the track.
It's simply running a loudness algorithm
to try and match each track to be the same volume level.
This is what we want.
So Loudness Normalization.
I advise you make sure that all the settings are left
as default, as this is really the best.
You've got -23 LUFS here.
We're working on perceived loudness, not RMS,
which is like an algorithm,
it looks at the whole track and normalizes it.
Everything should be here.
You don't wanna tick the first option,
and you definitely want to tick the second option.
So with that done, we'll click Apply,
and we'll wait for it to go through each track.
(screen scratching)
Okay.
Now, with that done,
you'll see that some tracks increased in volume,
some may be decreased a little bit.
It's done the Loudness Normalization.
Let's have a quick listen now and see what our levels are.
- [Voice Track] Have you informed madam?
- Okay, we're between -12 and -18.
- [Voice Track] And I will not, Tom.
- Between -12 and -18, this is looking really good.
- [Voice Track] When really do not have a--
- Between -12 and 18.
And these are all separate tracks that we're working with.
- [Voice Track] Stuck in a snow drift.
- Between -12 and -18.
Well, that's fabulous! (crowd cheering)
Okay, we could call it a day here.
We could end the video here and say, "Tutorial done."
All you need to do is select all the tracks,
Effect, Loudness Normalize under Volume and Compression,
and click OK to the default settings.
That would help most people.
But maybe you are a little OCD
and you wanna add a bit of compression to finalize things.
I recommend doing this.
Don't go too heavy on the compression,
otherwise, some of the tracks will be unnatural.
But again, you'll find Compressor
under the Volume and Compression section
of the Effects menu.
You click it, and I suggest you set something very light up.
So, Threshold here, we want it maybe -20.
Maybe if you're working on a radio drama,
you could afford to go less, -15 like this.
But I'm gonna say -20.
- 20 dB is a good default.
We'll leave the Noise Floor as is.
Ratio, 3 to 1.
That might be a bit harsh.
If we find it's compressing our voiceover
and flattening it out, making it sausage-like,
we'll take that number down to 2.
But I'm gonna leave it at 3 to the moment.
Attack, Release should be right over to the left,
as short as possible.
Now, this is an interesting option,
Make-up gain for 0 dB after compressing.
What this does is it compresses your audio,
which naturally squashes down the loud parts
and makes it a bit quieter.
So this loudness normalizes your audio
back up to nearly 0 dB, which is fantastic.
Meaning, you don't need to do a normalize after compression,
which is such a hassle anyway.
Leave this one un-tick, Compressed based on Peaks.
Don't tick that.
And click Apply.
Again, this will take a little while.
(screen scratching)
Okay! And you'll see in just a matter
of a couple of minutes,
it's gone through all 15 tracks and compressed.
And you'll see now how all of the waveforms
look very consistent in volume level.
So not only have we loudness normalized,
but we've also compressed.
And now, we should have consistent volume levels
across this whole Audacity project.
I hope this has helped you out.
And if you've got any questions
about matching volume levels in Audacity,
be sure to post them in the comments down below.
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