In the Sound Editor tool bar, Tools > Fading and Volume > Normalize... opens a dialog "Normalize" with a slider from 1x to 10x. This seems to just increase volume.

My understanding of "normalizing" is that the files are scanned to find the highest volume and then a volume level tag is added where needed to achieve approximately the same volume on all tracks.

I had a single track that I wanted to split into clips, each being a separate song. The single track has a very large difference in volume from song to song. I assumed that, after splitting into clips, I could then normalize all the clips in the mix editor. But, it seemed to only increase the volume by the same amount across all clips. Then, I got even more confused when, in a different track, I "normalized" that track; it was not split into clips. It just seemed to increase the overall volume. How can a single track be normalized? Can the volume in a single song be "leveled"? (I know I can set nodes in the track editor and manually adjust volumes as I want.)

What am I missing?

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any Roxio help at all on this subject, even though it is an option in the SE tools.

Thank you for any explanation.

The standard definition for "normalize" in digitally recorded songs is to "maximize" the volume so that the highest peak is as loud as the digital format allows. So, in this sense, an individual track can indeed be "normalized" if the highest peak isn't at the maximum allowed level. If you select Normalize for a set of tracks, yes, I believe it scans all the tracks, finds the track with the highest peak and calculates a single value to increase all the tracks by.

If you want each of the tracks to be "normalized" (maximized) then doing them all, one at a time, would be your solution in this case.

But, I would question if this is what you want if all of the tracks are from the same LP or pre-recorded tape? You would usually want a ballad to come across quieter than a "rockin' tune". If you normalize them separately, the ballad, which may have a much smaller dynamic range, may wind up sounding too loud compared to the rest of the songs.

That last part is just my 2 cents on something already mastered to have different volumes.

Thank you. That is a good explanation. It helps me a lot.