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When I edit voiceovers I normalize several times:

First I normalize the entire track then search for peaking parts and isolate them, normalize again and find more peaking parts until I'm satisfied.

It would be great to see peaking parts color coded or highlighted after normalizing.

Is this possible on Reaper or similar software?

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  • Why don't you just use a compressor/limiter to do all this automatically? And FWIW, after normalising nothing should clip. I suppose you mean, the peaking parts.
    – leftaroundabout
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 1:13
  • Only using a compressor doesn't cut it so I have to normalize first the use a compressor/levelator.
    – Gabriel Meono
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 4:33
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    if a compressor can't do that task, you're either using the wrong compressor or have it set up wrongly. That's the perfect job for them to do. Look into brick-wall limiters, they will do precisely that, only lower the volume of the very highest peaks, & simultaneously normalise the rest.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Dec 12, 2014 at 9:09

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You're not approaching this in the right way. By doing this "iterative normalization" you will be basically changing gain with little to no crossfade between the regions. This is not going to give you a natural sounding result. Sure an overall gain reduction may be necessary, but the initial recording should have enough headroom so that you can process the material without going into clipping. You should definitely apply some light compression to smooth out the peaks and an overall limiter to keep the peak below a pre-set amount, but I would not approach this by applying "normalization" in the way that you are.

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  • Thank you, I replaced the "iterative normalization" with two limiter passes. Still a waveform peak highlight would be helpful in a lot of cases.
    – Gabriel Meono
    Commented Dec 5, 2016 at 21:58

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