So after putting together a little experiment in Renoise I adjusted the levels so that the volume would peak at around 0dB (it’s like 0.2 dB on the L speaker but close enough).
Of course, once rendered, it’s quite a bit softer than all the other music in my collection.
So what’s the best way to normalize without clipping? Is it cool to just open it in Audacity, raise the volume by 2-3 dB, and re-export it? Or is it more complicated than that?
OK, I see the option for adjusting the headroom, but when I set it to 0 dB, everything goes back up into the red. Doesn’t that mean I’d have to manually take the values back down, achieving nothing? Or am I missing something?
Normalizing the signal is bringing its peaks to 0dB level. If that is all you need, render your song in 32 bit giving plenty of head room for the signal so that it stays well below the 0dB mark.
Once you have it saved, open it up in any editor and use the normalize feature and convert it to 16 bits if you would like to save some space. But chances are, your track still won’t sound the same loud as the ones in your music collection for the reason that those tracks have a compressed dynamic range. Without going too much into the detail what that is, you can achieve a similar effect by using the internal Maximizer plugin in Renoise that you put on the master track.
Its parameters are not documented very well, but play around with the controls a bit, watch the meters, and you will quickly understand what it does.
Normalizing the audio simply means applying a constant amount of gain to the signal, in order to raise or lower the overall peak level.
Ideally you never want to go above 0dB, because this results in clipping and distortion. So I would strongly recommend that you leave the track headroom set to the default -6dB level, simply because you’ll usually need that extra headroom in order to prevent clipping when mixing all your tracks together.
I don’t think you’re really talking about normalization here, anyway. I think what you actually mean is the perceived loudness of the music?
This is a slightly trickier subject than simply normalizing the audio, since there are many factors that can make a track sound louder. You can easily have two completely different songs that are both perfectly normalized to the same peak level (0dB), but one will appear to sound louder than the other.
One obvious place to start experimenting is with dynamic range compression. You can use a compressor to ‘squash’ the signal a bit, in order to bring up the volume of the quieter parts, while also trimming the peaks of the louder parts. This can help to make your sound more uniform and ‘full’ sounding, but you should also be very careful not to squash the signal too much and turn it to crap
If you want a very quick and easy to way to get a nice overall boost in your Renoise songs, try adding a Maximizer device to your Master track, then start with one of the ‘Master Boost’ presets. This device can boost your overall sound while also acting as a limiter to prevent things from clipping above 0dB. You can quite easily get away with a 3dB - 6dB boost without introducing too many problems, but it will obviously depend on your music and how everything is put together.