Understand spoken language

Using Audacity to Normalise the vertical centre

Submitted by admin on 20 November 2022

Sometimes the audio is centered vertically above the 0.0 line. In this case there is another step to perform to improve things. This step is known as "normalization" and will center the audio vertically.

Before normalization:

before normalization

After normalization, notice how the audio is now centered vertically: 

After normalization

In order to do this, you apply the "Normalize" option to the entire recording.

You will first need to select the audio to normalize (usually the whole audio with CTRL+A).

Then select "Normalize..." from the "Effect" menu:

Normalize menu option

The Normalize popup appears, and you can leave the default values:

Normalize popup