normalising, changing gain, error, error correction of audio file...

[ine-kpro...]

curious to know whether normalising or gain boosting an audio file does more harm than good. i know that each process introduces error correction, but will you still get the same quality audio but louder or will it add artifacts such as grainyness or loss of top or bottom end, etc to your original sample when you apply normalising or gain changing. will changing gain more than once to your audio file, like boost 10 percent and then realise you have to boost another 20percent lessen the quality of the audio file.

when people talk about errors and error correction that happen in the digital domain, is it only clicks or glitches that occur or are there other things that happen to the audio file, like maybe you lose depth, loss of detail etc.

[moogus]

Any time you move a fader, normalise, pan, (other than hard left or right) use any plugin...pretty much do anything to audio inside a computer, there are rounding errors which distorts the signal.

Dont be paranoid about it, just use your ears and dont do unnessesary digital processing.

Having said that, who cares about distortion when everything gets clipped by 10db in mastering anyway.


M

[ine-kpro...]

the reason i ask is because im organising my samples and some of the samples are way below 10%, like hihats. so i am wondering whether i am doing any harm by normalising them or increasing them to 70 percent for example. i mean am i better off leaving audio at 10-40% and just use the sampler or the track channel to boost up the volume.

[Lagerfeldt]

Each time you process you will change the data and potentially add errors and degrade sound quality.

Doing any destructive editing will actually often sound worse than real time processing since the signal is usually truncated instead.

Normalizing is a feature rarely needed and much abused. Process, limit at the end of the chain. That's it.