Audacity Recording Levels

Posted by: endlessnessism on 04 November 2014

I use the Audacity program from time to time to convert vinyl and other analogue sources to digital.

Of course you have to get the recording levels right, avoid clipping etc.

One way is the old-fashioned one of experimenting - playing a few bits and pieces and making sure the loudest bits are just within the recording limits.

The other way is to use the amplification tool in Audacity - record at comfortably-low level and then automatically amplifying (without clipping) to a level just within the recording limits.

Does it matter which method I use? Obviously the second way is easiest but I have a funny feeling someone will tell me I should not be using an amplification tool to fiddle around with the recorded signal.

Posted on: 04 November 2014 by Bananahead

I haven't used Audacity much but when I have I have used Normalise. It seems to work well and I like the results..

Posted on: 04 November 2014 by DaveBk

The risk would be loosing dynamic range. How much impact this has would depend on the bit depth you are using with higher bit rates being better. For example, if you were recording using a 16 bit sample, but only recorded a signal using half the available headroom you would have used 15 bits of resolution. Scaling this up using normalisation can't add any additional information, only spread what you already have over more bits. So, the hard way is better... Often the way of the world IMO.

Posted on: 04 November 2014 by winkyincanada

But if you're recording in 24bit, the differences bewteen the approaches would be trivial (unless you recorded very quietly). That's one reason to record in a higher resolution than is necessary for the final product.