When you use the normalize function in NERO (and other rippers,
burners, etc.) to reduce the volume variations of a group of WAV files
from different sources, does the normalize process increase/decrease
the entire audio track to match the average of all the tracks...or is
it more like compression, where the loud portions of a given track are
reduced in volume and the quieter portions are increased in volume?
The reason I ask is that I've been burning audio CDs for a few years,
but I've always used Cool Edit to manually set the volume of each
track by ear so they all match. This produces excellent-sounding
results, but takes a couple of hours. Today, I found NERO's normalize
function and tried it on a new CD I'm working on. While the normalizer
did a great job (and saved me alot of time and effort) by normalizing
all the tracks on-the-fly, I swear the sound of some (most?) of the
tracks sound compressed--with noticeably less punch and dynamics. Am I
hearing things, or do on-the-fly normalizers use compression (instead
of raising or lowering the entire track's volume level to match the
average of all the tracks in a given group)?
