How do I adjust recorded audio so that the quiet parts become louder and the loud parts become quieter?

Question

I'm currently using Audacity. I also have no understanding of audio design so if you could explain things in simple terms it would be greatly appreciated.

So my buddy and I recorded a podcast, but his audio is a lot quieter than my own. It's in one file so I can't adjust the audios separately. Is there a way I could normalize our audios to be the same volume?

I've messed around with the Compressor, Normalize, and Limiter options, but I have no idea how they work and couldn't get any of them to fix the issue.

Answer 1

This is one reason why a) you do a level check before you go & b) why you record to separate tracks.

If compression/limiting can't make up the gain enough, or over-compresses one voice without making enough gain in the other, then you're probably going to have to manually chop into segments & move one voice to another track, so you can then treat them separately.