How to use Group Waveform Normalize in Adobe Audition 3

Hittz · Member Joined: 18 Dec 2006 Location: United States

Ever burned an mp3 cd and some songs sounded lower than others? I know I have. Its annoying to listen to a cd and have to lower or raise the volume on certain songs because of the differences in their volume. I will show (in Adobe Audition ver. 3 - previous versions work the same) how to "group normalize" the waveform of your audio files or in plain English, how to achieve a uniform volume level. We can also edit the bit rates of our audio files via batch processing, to help achieve uniform sound quality . OK then, let's do it.

Open Adobe Audition and click the small folder to import your audio files. (alternatively you can click on the File tab at the top left, then click Open)

You will then see this, then locate where your files are, and while holding down your left mouse button, drag and cover all the files you want to import into Audition. After all are covered (highlighted) click Open. (Note: Just for simplicity I am only importing 5 files at this time, although in the past I have successfully used this procedure with more than 175 files)

They will look like this in Audition.

Now, under the Edit tab click on Group Waveform Normalize

Your files will be imported into the Group Waveform Normalize dialogue box, like this,
then click the Analyze loudness tab

Now, click the Analyze Statistical information button and wait for Audition to finish analyzing.

After its done with that, you will see numbers at the top, they represent the different area volume levels which have either been reduced or raised, to an average (midrange) level to give all the files a uniform volume level
After this is done, click the Normalize TAB

These are different ways you may normalize your audio files.
The default settings here work well. Just go ahead and click Run Normalize

After thats done, go to the file tab on Audition, and click "Save all Audio as"

At the top right, choose your destination folder, I chose my source folder as my
destination because I want to overwrite the unedited originals. Use the browse button to save your audio where you chose to.
I left the filename template as is. I want to keep the original names of my audio files.
You may change your output format by dropping the menu to the right, I chose mp3 pro,
if you click the options button you will be able to do do a little more to your files, here is where I changed the bit rate of all my files to 192kbps to give them more uniformity. In some cases you will have a group of audio files
with various bit rates. (128kbps, 160kbps, 96kbps, 192kbps) these different bit rates cause unlike crispness.
At the bottom left I chose (checked) overwrite existing files so my originals will be replaced by these edited ones.
After we have set all these things we can go ahead and click the Save button.

After clicking the save button you may get a warning telling you that you may be reducing the quality of your audio files. Its just letting you know, in the case of mp3 files it is a lossy compression format, which means
some of the quality of the original file will be lost. Worry not, you wont even notice it. Now, after all is done, go to where you saved your newly edited files. Listen to them then burn 'em. Your CD will have uniform volume and very good sound quality.

HITTZ
_________________
Seek, And You Shall Find.

Daniel LaMount · Member Joined: 18 May 2009 Location: Sweden

Well, I know this is not all topic essential but... I have Audition 3.0.1 and it's impossible to open/import more then SINGLE files from the Files window (you can shift+click several files but they don't open). However, if I lift files in from explorer or using "open files with" then it suddenly it works! Now, Audition 1.5 was simple in many ways but when it comes to file handling it was a dream compared to this! This is just absurd!

And then - as if this wasn't enough - the next issue is that those opened files are NOT saved in the session file UNLESS they all are used in the Multitrack View!!!?? What is this?!! And it seems just even more absurd to have put all (175, was it?) files in the Multitrack View just to keep them in the projekt??

I've reinstalled and patched, meet the specs... and bla bla... (Can't see whatever I'm missing here anyway...)