Attack of the Pod Penguins 5: Normalization

For a professional radio sound, smooth out the loud and soft parts of your podcast with this versatile tool.

By Tony Steidler-Dennison, LinuxWorld.com, 11/30/06

In this installment of the "Attack of the Pod Penguins" series, we'll move away from the GUI tool Audacity and into the realm of the command line. While Audacity is clearly a great open source tool with features rivaling that of its proprietary counterparts, it also suffers a bit from attempting to be everything to everyone. It strays a bit from the open source philosophy of creating small tools that do one thing well.

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Early on in my use of Audacity, I realized that, despite Audacity's full-featured design, the best way to attack some of the issues of podcasting is still the single-tool approach. While Audacity does some things quite well - visual editing, compression, exporting to a full range of file formats - the end result with other built-in Audacity tools was a little less desirable. Somewhere in the implementation of these single tools within the Audacity interface, they lost a bit of their power and charm. Don't misunderstand me - my podcasts would be nearly impossible without Audacity. It just doesn't always offer the polished final product that I'm looking for with The Roadhouse, The ClarkCast and IndieFeed Blues.

Whether you're interested in a music-format podcast, or one that's primarily spoken-word, you'll inevitably run into some vexing issues. The issues always seem to stem from the nature of audio recording and how the raw files at your fingertips, awaiting editing and post-production, can sound so different from what you expect to hear in a final format. Despite great effort to record files of a consistent quality and sound, there's always a gap between expectations and reality. The problem is the transfer of the sound from a natural holistic medium - sound waves in the air captured by the ear and interpreted by the brain - to one in which software and hardware are an integral part. There's something about computers that squeezes the natural life out of audio files. Honestly, the same could be said of magnetic tape in the days of reel-to-reel recording, or of cassettes in their heyday. The act of capturing audio in any mechanical or electronic format tends to suck the natural feel right out.

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