Normalising audio in Vegas 6

gjh wrote on 1/8/2006, 9:45 PM

I recorded a track directly into an audio track in vegas 6 from a CD. It starts off soft and then builds into a crescendo. The loud parts are very distorted. How do you manage the volume of audio tracks?
graeme Hughes

Comments

songsj wrote on 1/10/2006, 1:39 AM

The first thing I would do is turn down the entire track and see if you still have distortion in the loudest parts [ Check the master volume as well ]. If you do, you may have overdriven the inputs during recording and if it's bad there is not a lot you can do to fix it. If you can get the distortion to go away by turning down the entire track then you have a few options, one is compression, another is to highlight the track and right click on your mouse, from the menu select normalize, then you may need to turn down the track with the fader. Or you could insert volume envelopes at the beginning and ending of each loud section and turn each section down with envelopes. If this sounds confusing don't feel bad, I'm just getting into this myself, do a search on volumes etc and you will find some heplful posts from some very smart people here. Good luck.

rraud wrote on 1/10/2006, 8:31 AM

This may be after the fact but,
- Extracting audio from a CD (aka, ripping) is an easier and "cleaner" function than recording via analog circuits. (espeacialy though a consumer-grade soundcard)
- The optional Noise Reduction 2.0 plug-in has a Clippped Peak restoration mode which works good on clipped and milidly distorted sounds.

Geoff_Wood wrote on 1/10/2006, 8:18 PM

You talk to the producer of the original music. It is their judgement as to the dynamics and musical aspects.

As to the distortion, if it's on the original you are pretty much stuck with it. You can *attempt* various restoration methods, but I've never had much success.

geoff