Evening out the volume of spoken word

[Jerrysnb]

I'm copying some spoken word tapes. The problem I've run into is that the lead-in music and the introduction are significantly louder than the actual narration. In fact, I had to allow a ton of clipping in order to hear the narration.

I had thought that normalization was what I wanted, but I don't think I understand what it does. It certainly didn't do what I expected, which was to adjust the gain up and down so that the quiet parts and the loud parts came out sounding more or less the same.

I'm thinking that I have to manually create a filter to boost the quiet part of each track.

Am I missing something?

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Hi,

No you're not.  Normalisation won't change the relative volumes of two different sections of audio.  Adding a filter to boost the quiet part (or quieten the loud part) is the way to go.

[Jerrysnb]

I think what I'm looking for is a compression filter. I'm not sure how generally useful that would be.

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

We did think about it, but it's an anathama for most vinyl buffs.

[Jerrysnb]

It's certainly not something I would want to use on music. I have no idea how often people handle spoken word stuff. This is a first, but possibly not the last, for me.

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

OK, noted, thank you.