"Last week we made a music CD from a live digital recording the easy and simple way. Today we're going to fix volume levels and do graceful fades and transitions using Audacity and normalize. Give yourself a lot of disk space, make copies of your original sound files before you start, and remember that Audacity has Undo and Redo commands, so don't stress out over making mistakes.
"Normalization is a term you hear a lot, and it has two different meanings. One is to adjust all tracks to the same volume level, so that you're not surprised by a loud song following a soft song. Another meaning is to amplify a single track proportionally, or part of a track, making it as loud as possible while preserving its dynamic range. Audacity does the latter, but it cannot normalize a diverse batch of songs. For that we use the excellent command-line tool, normalize..."
