Logic Pro 8 normalize question

[Taybot]

i was wondering if I should normalize my beats when I bounce them? I always see the option and people say it makes your song as loud as they can go without peaking, which seems like a good thing but should I normalize my beats? I do like my beats beats being loud.

Thanks!

 

[Pete Thomas]

If you are bouncing to a final mixdown, then normalising will make them louder, though not the loudest they will go. This is done with compression (normal and/or multiband) or limiting. Plenty of good info on this if you search around here. Beware making it too loud though, overcompressed tracks may sound good and loud initially but can get waering on the ears.

BTW, in some cases I think if you are bouncing to mp3, it may be best to leave a little headroom, e.g. 1 dB. For uncompressed audio e.g wav, aif etc.) no headroom required.

 

[Taybot]

cool thanks! Last month I had a long thread going about Limiters, which I just resurrected about 20 minutes ago actually cuz there are still some things I'm wondering.

If there is no Inserts on the master fader, do you know why that could be?

 

[Ken Adams]

Also, bear in mind that normalizing works relative to the loudest peak in the audio you are processing. So, for instance, if you (extreme example) had a drone of soft crickets chirping at about -12db and then somewhere you had a loud cymbal crash that peaked at near digital zero, -.02db, then normalizing would only bring the volume of the entire audio up .02 db to bring the loudest peak to digital zero, 0db. This is also contingent upon the settings for normalization in Logic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_normalization

As to the master fader... I find it a bit strange as well, but as far as I can tell, it might be useful with surround sound applications for controlling (at least the monitoring level) of multiple outputs. But you can't bounce from it as far as I know, so use your inserts on an output group like output 1-2. Hope that makes sense.