What is normalization?
We have all heard many times about normalization when it comes to ensuring that the volume of different audio files or different videos maintains a constant and similar sound.
We have rarely stopped to analyze why this process is called normalization, what is normalized?
And if we study the subject, we can discover that many things are normalized, not just the volume levels of the different audio or video files. The databases are also normalized and normalized in many other things, so it is logical that the question of what the word normalization refers to does not arise.
For this it is important that we make a bit of history, because for a long time it was assumed that normalization was referring to finding the maximum volume peaks of each song and amplifying the entire song so that the peak will reach its peak without distortion.
This was obviously a very elementary and also naive concept that really did not give satisfactory results because the songs kept playing with disparate volumes with a different loudness for each song.
If we pay attention we will see that the word normalization was misused since normalization would really be almost synonymous with standardization. In other words, what a standard measure is obtained and it is intended that all digital files or songs have a very close volume is standard not only in its highest volume peaks, but throughout the song so that when we listen to our music we can have a standardized loudness all the time. This means that the loudness would remain at a previously set value and would not vary much during the reproduction of several songs or many songs. Then we are already understanding that by normalization we must understand that the loudness or the level of volume gain is standardized throughout the song and during all the songs, with which we managed to have a very even volume level throughout the reproduction of a Playlist and that we are not going to be forced to manipulate the volume knob to manually adjust differences, since standardizing means that there will be no very noticeable differences. Later we will explain in another article Because some music files take up much more space on the hard disk than another and because this impacts the sound quality.
For today at least it has become clear that as a synonym for normalization we could use standardization of the volume of music and that I think makes it much easier to understand what an organizer does and is simply to standardize the entire level of music throughout the song to A standard that we have set before, there is currently only one normalizer that is capable of performing this function and we are talking about mp4gain.
