My sound file is too soft! What's the easiest fix?

I have a recording my brother made of an REO Speedwagon concert I went to in Chicago-he was too young, I took a girl, he listened at home to the radio simulcast.

A college friend eventually digitized this bless him, BUT it is not loud enough! On my little clip portables, it just will not play very loud even at maximum volume.

I'm running a bunch of Macs, what is the easiest way to improve the signal level without clipping it?

 

Download Audacity (free) ... it has lots of controls. I use it all the time for basic things (I'm not an expert) on my iMac, can help a little if needed. I usually adjust gain, fade in/out, maybe even speed up or slow things down (with or without pitch changes).

 

Agreed. What you want to do is to "peak normalise" the levels, so the loudest level corresponds to the maximum allowed:

Normalize - Audacity Manual .

 

Sometimes there will be a single errant peak (eg. a large click or pop) which prevents the rest of the audio from reaching a normal level. In this case, you might need to use the "Limiter" effect to cut it down to size.

Otherwise, the peak normalise feature should work fine.

 

Well, I would have to know/see the files first. It's hard to give you an answer of what to do in any software without seeing what you're dealing with.

To be clear: clipping is when the peaks of a file exceed zero digital full-scale. The ways you prevent that is to use a limiter or band compression. If the peaks in the files are already normalized to zero or thereabouts, there may still be ways to goose up the volume, but a limiter will probably still have to be employed.

If you can, send me a sample of the file. You can upload it to a cloud service and give us the link.

 

It's slightly ironic that, if this concert recording was released commercially these days, it would probably be loaded with digital clipping

 

No. Again: clipping is when a digital file exceeds digital zero. A mastering engineer prevents that by using a limiter or some other means in the effort to make the volume loud. If a file has that buzz-cut look, that doesn't mean it is clipped if it is at or just below zero, or 100%.

A popular standard today is LUFS. Certain RMS points are geared toward the various streaming services like Apple, Spotify, and others. Of course, the user can always specify where he wants that sweet spot. A limiter my be engaged, depending on the characteristics of the file. In my own needledrops and whatnot, I usually shoot for around an average of anywhere from -11 db to -18 db.

 

Allow me to illustrate:
This Elton John song was smashed to hell, and sounds like it. It is not clipped. It looks like it, but it's not. A limiter was used to make it loud.


Here are the amplitude stats. If you can see it, it says there are no clipped samples.

 

Buy the CD?
https://www.amazon.com/Live-Chicago-1979-REO-Speedwagon/dp/B079ZY3FLH

If you have a Qobuz subscription there are a couple of radio broadcast concerts from Chicago in the same year.
One sounds poor, the other sounds much worse.
If you've never tried Qobuz you can trial it for nothing. Yes you do have to enter valid payment details, but if you want to cancel for any reason they honour the trial to its conclusion.

 

I don't want to start an ideological or semantic argument. Just wanted to share something else.

Here is a section of the waveform for Good Times Roll by The Cars - from the version of their self-titled album included in the 'Original Album Series' boxset from 2010. This is an exact lossless rip of that CD, and the display has not been zoomed in vertically etc.

I'm sure you can agree that this is clipped. There are multiple consecutive samples sitting at 0dB. If, according to your definition, it's not clipped on the CD (because it doesn't exceed 0, which BTW is only possible in floating-point format), then it was intentionally clipped by the mastering engineer. This is seriously what passed for 'professional' mastering in 2010.

 

Here are the amplitude statistics for the above track. More than 43 000 possibly clipped samples.

 

OK, to clarify: most mastering engineers do not allow overs, but some do. In fact, in the "needledrop techniques and tips" thread, John Morris and I discussed this. For the most part, overs are not allowed. Also, certain audio editors will show overs when they don't actually exist.

I notice you also have Audition. Actually, any quality program will enable one to run stats on a file. That will pretty much tell you if there are overs or not.

 

Agreed

 

What software is that? I'll have to try and find the file, it's only on my portable which now got damaged and is frozen. Though I have a Don Henley file with a similar problem. That show was at Alpine Valley, Wisconsin, touring for Building A Perfect Beast and as I related in another thread, my buddy really wanted to take a beer in. He stuck it in his hoodie and boldly walked right through security

 

The software I used in that screenshot is Adobe Audition CS5, but I use two or three programs for my work including iZotope RX7 and Ozone 8.

You probably realize by now that you should never keep all of your stuff on just one device or hard drive. Back up! Back up! Back up!!!

 

Oh SOMEWHERE the file is backed up. But my backup system has turned into a mess. Improving and streamlining that was supposed to happen over the summer

 

If your players support it, ReplayGain. That doesn’t require the audio to be edited. This assumes that there isn’t a peak that’s a lot higher than the rest of the program. That would also throw off normalization in an editor.

 

Hah, I'm glad these tiny things work at all! The clip just broke on one dang it, and not fixable. Nah, I need to scale the files themselves.

 

Ah, well, I thought it was worth a try. At least Audacity is nice and free.

 

I have this problem all the time with live stuff I download (last of which was Gary Numan show Amazon Prime offered) Borrow a Wind0ws PC and install Free Video Volume Booster. Works like a charm. Don't go over 10 db boost, or 15 if it's extraordinarily quiet, so as not to introduce any distortion.

 

I wonder if the live recording is part of Wolfgang's vault?
Wolfgang's: Authentic Vintage Concert Posters, Concert Streaming, Concert T-Shirts, Concert Photos give it a try. I second Audacity, normalize it to -0.1 and call it a day. I also use Reaper, it's a pretty good audio suite as well.

 

It would be much better if we could get a sample of what he's talking about instead of just offering up solutions to something we don't know about. It could be that the files were just transcribed at too low a volume. We just don't know.

 

Hey I found the Don Henley file, yay. I'll upload it to friend's FileFactory account, unless anyone has a better idea. (The whole thing is 574MB; one song is maybe 25MB).