The older Audacity didn’t have a convenient way to set RMS (loudness). You need to download and install RMS Normalize.

…It’s assuming you’re starting-out with a good recording of a good performance. It will get your levels in-spec (for ACX Audiobooks) and it will check your noise level.

But, it’s really intended to make your voice “sound better”. There is a Recommend Audiobook Mastering Process and it’s also good for voiceover with the exception that there usually isn’t a -3dB peak limit for voiceover so you can set the limiter to 0dB. And you can run the whole process over again if you want “more”. And you can optionally apply make-up gain (or Amplify again) to bring everything up by +3dB, bringing your peaks back to 0dB. Then if you hard-limit to -3dB your new reduced/limited peaks will be -3dB. The Amplify effect will default to whatever up or down gain is required for normalized (“maximized”) 0dB peaks. That’s useless unless he knows where you’re starting. The new limiter won’t distort the waveform and a reasonable amount will of the “new and improved” limiting have almost no effect on the “quality”. So, you can go-ahead and try the old limiter. As a rule, distortion should be avoided but it will alter the character/quality of the sound and you might like what a little clipping does to your voice. The old hard limiter will clip (distort) the waveform. The current version of Audacity (2.4.2) will probably work fine on Windows 7 even though it’s not “officially” supported.Īudacity’s built-in limiter was improved some time ago so you must be using a rather old version of Audacity.

Hard limiter audacity