normalize question

[julien breval]

Hello everybody

I'm sorry to anwser so late, but I had lots of things to do ...

Well, actually I never thought normalizing would be so problematic. In the past, when a "song" was 100% finished, I used to normalize it to 0 dB in order to use full digital scale for dynamics. Indeed, even if you tune your microphones or synthesis devices carefully, sometimes the levels are quite low so you are not doing 16-bit audio but, say 11 bits for example. Normalizing (with interpolation) should give better results in this case. To sum up, I thought normalizing as the right method for getting the loudest possible sound without affecting the timbre itself.

I have never been interested in strong perceptive loudness so compressing is useless for me. Moreover, a compressor affects the audio timbre because of the rise and fall times, which is clearly unwanted for my music. Finally, I do music for myself so I'm not concerned by the fact this music should sound the same on lots of different speakers.

For this track (my first one made using DP), I didn't use any plugins inside DP. Actually, there are only piano recordings, some of which were processed in realtime in Max/MSP, then imported to DP. There won't be any mastering processes because I want to keep the original sound. Dithering looks useless too, especially in 16 bit. After the track was finished, I wanted to normalize it for using as much digital resolution as possible. Converting it to 24 bit before normalizing is clearly useless as DP internal processing looks independant from export resolution (please correct me if I'm wrong). But finally I don't know if I will ever normalize it; for now I think I will just keep it as is.

Best regards,
-j