Tag: spotify audio normalization on or off

Audio normalization


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Audio normalization

The concern to achieve an adequate sound in the music and a correct balance of the volume levels is something that actually takes centuries.

As soon as the first string quartets or the first symphony orchestras were formed, it was detected that there was a need to maintain an adequate balance of the volumes of each instrument section.
In fact, it is not accidental with a symphony orchestra to have a certain amount of each of the instruments, nor is it accidental that they are accommodated in the way they are accommodated when they are going to play a symphonic concert.

The reason for this is to achieve an adequate balance to the sound of the complete musical piece and it is something that has been thoroughly studied for many centuries.
That is, the human being many years ago of text, what was important to take care of the loudness of each part of a musical piece And of course the global musical work.

Hence we have become accustomed to musical dynamics, What is it that music has more intense moments and softer moments but must be audible all the time, it must be something that is not taken lightly.

Great masters of classical music paid a lot of attention and that is how it was achieved that symphonic orchestras were formed from the amount of instruments that are formed and that were accommodated in a specific way in order to achieve adequate volume management.

This has generated that our ear is used to hearing an adequate musical balance with the correct audio levels and when that is not so we detect that there is a problem and we seek to solve it.

With modern technology and the emergence of digitized music it has been very noticeable for all people that it has become an almost indispensable necessity to normalize the audio.

Normalizing the audio means achieving a standardization where the highest and lowest levels are maintained within a certain standard or certain limits so that it is audible and pleasant for us to listen to all the musical parts that make up a song.

The normalization of the audio has evolved since the music that at first was simply looking for the highest volume peaks was digitized and now in programs such as mp4gain it has achieved very important sophistication that resembles a compression mix, with the use of limiters, and an adequate management of the volume gain of each of the instruments and sounds that form a song.

In other words, we are facing much more modern and advanced algorithms that manage to normalize the audio of music files and videos, even being able to convert from one format to another without problem and normalizing it at the same time. Even The Advance are modern What can perfectly modify the speed of the audio without affecting the Pitch and vice versa.

If you need to achieve the normalization of the audio of a video in the most popular formats of an audio file in the most popular formats the solution is mp4gain which will allow you to easily convert to the format you want and normalize in the most efficient way that exists in the moment your audio or your favorite video.


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How does a modern mp3 normalization really work and why is it superior?

Actually we will refer to an audio normalization in general, regardless of the format.

normalize volume

-First attempts to normalize the audio

As soon as the digital format emerged and people were able to store audio files on their computers, it was necessary to encode them to save space, without losing quality.

This is how formats such as mp3 emerged, because they managed to make the same song occupy 10 times less space than a wav format, and if it was well coded and / or with a quality encoder, it sounded practically the same. It was gained in space and the loss of quality was practically zero.

For this it was necessary to maintain a samplerate of at least 44,100 kHz and a bitrate of at least 128.

Initially the most accessible format was the mp3 and although later other formats have emerged (even looseless like FLAC), the mp3 continues to take the place of favorite.

normalize

But when a person listens one song after another, he will soon perceive differences in the sonority of these songs. It seems that the volume level is not even, and that is when it becomes necessary to normalize, to avoid having to manually correct the audio volume level of each song by turning the volume knob.

Even Spotify has had to incorporate some normalize option to avoid these annoying volume gain level changes between songs.

The difference is that Spotify only normalizes the volume while playing the songs, so if we stored them on our hard drive, the volumes would remain uneven.

-The solution of volume peaks

The first attempts to normalize the audio of an mp3 were inefficient, they only looked for the peak of a song and amplified it all to the point where those peaks did not distort.

But this did not eliminate the perception that one song would sound louder than others.

Over time the volume level normalization algorithms have been refined and have become more subtle and complex. They have been achieving similar results to those obtained by the great sound consoles in musical concerts, where the music is highly processed to – among other things – make the volume levels are even and unchanged, and also achieve a sussuro of The singer’s voice is audivble even if the battery gives tremendous blows in a roll.

Mp4Gain has come to obtain these results, without the need for you to invest thousands of dollars in hardware like these musical groups or large radio stations do.

Today, audio normalization really is a combination of compression, limiters and normalization, which achieves an amazing result. Far from those first attempts to level the volume gain of each song to avoid big differences.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NORMALIZE AND MASTERIZE

The process and the differences between normalizing and mastering are often confused. Although it may seem to be the same, it is not.

Mastering can be of crucial importance according to which processes, for example: in musical matters, there are mastering engineers who are dedicated exclusively to that.

That does not mean that we cannot learn or acquire the necessary knowledge to be able to properly use some processing effect or some plugin in an appropriate way to be able to get more out of our audio file.

But you have to keep in mind that this audio processing helps your audio montage, song … sound with more punch, more strength, more energy, have more life.

Is mastering compressed or limited?

Rather those two processes and some more are done.

volume booster

Its mission is to maintain the same volume amplitude throughout the audio file, that is, it compresses when it has to compress and limits when it has to limit.

I’m going to give a rough example of what manual mastering would be like.

Can you still imagine the sound technician who detects when the signal volume is too high (the singer gets too close to the microphone, shouts …) and lowers the fader. Or the opposite case, when it detects the low volume (the singer moves too far from the microphone, does not speak with enough force …) and raises the fader. Always trying to maintain the same volume amplitude.

I’m going to give you a homemade definition: “lower what is high and raise what is low“.

As before it was an invented example, to do the job of processing the sound we regulate the different parameters available to the “processor” (Mastering is also called “processing” since in the past a device called “processor” was used which comes from “dynamics processor”). These parameters are:

The threshold (threshold): fundamental characteristic of the compressor that represents the point or level from which if the volume of the sound exceeds or lowers it, the dynamics processor is put into operation.

Ratio (Attenuation or Gain Ratio): Defines the amount of attenuation or gain that is applied to the signal. At noise gates the attenuation can be preset so that it really is a mute.

Attack time: This is the time it takes for the signal to attenuate, limit, mute or amplify. In general, slower times work best at low frequencies and fast ones at high frequencies. When processing a signal containing all frequencies, a compromise situation is forced.

To maximize the energy of the signals, particularly in broadcasting applications, there are multiband compressors that divide the spectrum into several bands and apply different times to each.

Release time: It is the opposite of the attack time, that is, the time it takes to go from the state where the processing is running to rest. They are usually longer times than those of attack.

Hold (maintenance time): Specifies the minimum time that processing will take place.

Stereo link (stereo link): With dynamics processors in general when used to process a two-channel (stereo) signal, it is necessary to link the processing action of both channels to happen on both at the same time. Otherwise, the sound image will be confusing and changing from the center to one side or the other.

Automatic: This function allows you to control any of the parameters listed automatically depending on the characteristics of the signal.

By pass (deactivation): Activating it allows you to hear the unprocessed signal, while if it is not activated you hear the processed signal.

Normalization is a process by which the highest peak is sought and reduced or increased (dB) as adjusted. Never pass the 0dB in normalization or mastering, because then it would be itching “clipping”.