leveling audio so lows/highs are closer?

[spiritgumm]

this is more of a regular audio editing question. Is there a way with a wave editor to make the lows and highs closer together? I experimented with NERO but I don't know exactly what I'm doing. "Normalization" changes the whole audio volume proportionately, so that doesn't help. "Dynamic Processsor" seems to work better but I don't know what the "Attack time" and "Release time" should be set as.

[TheFamilyMan]

If your terms "lows" and "highs" refer to volume level, and you want less variation in the volume level, the use of an audio compression filter will do just that: the more the audio is compressed, the more the low and high levels will be brought together.

Edit:

The nero "dynanic processor" is effectively a compression filter. The audio is compressed by lessening the slope of the line on the graph. A completely horizontal line, i.e. zero slope, would equalize all low and high volumes to the same volume (which is probably undesirable). The attack and release times soften the effect of the compression somewhat when there are sudden volume changes.

[spiritgumm]

Thanks for defining the process - compression - and confirming the Dynamic filter does the job. I'm trying to make music cds from soundtracks (after deleting the Center channel from 5.1 which usually has all the dialogue). The music volume varies to accomodate the dialogue, so the leveling effect should improve it. The Attack and Release dials seem to adjust the volume, so I'm not entirely sure what's the best way to use them.

[TheFamilyMan]

There's more to setting up the compression than setting the attack and decay settings. The curve itself needs to be adusted as described in the manual, section 7.4:
http://www.uwm.edu/IMT/Info/nero/nerowaveeditor.pdf
Enjoy!

[Bokir]

Actually as a sound person myself, I have to stress the important of doing this properly. And so sorry, you can't just strap a dynamic compressor to a sound track and expect it to sound good.

The problem is, most probably the sound coming from a soundtrack is already compressed. And adding another step is surely not going to improve a thing.

What you really need to do, is to alter the volume (level) by way of sound mixing dynamically--up and down the gain level according to the music level. That way you're not sacrificing the sound dynamic from the previous mix.

And for that, you can use your video editing software volume graph, or
You can use any hardware mixer. or
Try to get yourself a software known as audio workstation, like Digidesign ProTools, Steinberg Nuendo, or Apple Logic.

Hope this help.

Good luck and have fun.

[spiritgumm]

I dont think Nero has a "video editing software volume graph" but the audio wave editor is pretty extensive. The Nero Equalizer has gain settings for various frequencies, so I suppose that would work. What I did was use the Nero Dynamic Processor to increase (not compress) the whole signal while emphasizing an increase in amplitude of the lower elements. It looks like this increased their volume more than if I boosted volume overall proportionately (and I didnt have to spend alot of time fine-tuning). Was this wrong?
Seems like Nero or Audacity or Cooledit should have features to do this easily (so I hope I don't need to buy any more software).