When I drag the 2-pass normalize audio effect to the track and drag the slider all the way to -10, the loudness of the output does not change at render time. Of course I have clicked the analyze buttons. This seems very broken. I want the 2-pass because the one pass “normalize” makes the volume shoot up at the beginning of every cut.
Am I missing something?
I think you must be, but I honestly don’t know what yet, unless you’re using some very ancient kdenlive version … It was broken many years ago, but I’ve been using it without trouble in pretty much every project since.
-10 is a lot louder than I’ve ever set it, but it still does what it says on the box.
Oh, reading what you wrote more carefully, perhaps it’s
You probably want to put that effect directly on a clip, since (I’m assuming) it analyses files, and there is no audio file associated with a track as such.
That would be odd since the single-pass normalize works at the track level.
Do you mean clips in the project bin or clips in the timeline. Applying it in the timeline to each cut would kind of defeat the purpose and be way too much work.
using -10 is just to see if it’s doing anything. It isn’t.
Not really if you understand the difference between those two things.
The single-pass ‘normalisation’ is a simple output filter with no knowledge of anything that hasn’t been played yet, that tries to smooth the output to some level based on a rolling average of what has been played so far - which is why you see the initial spike for some audio, and why it can be attached as a track filter applied at render time.
The two-pass is based on EBU R 128 which is about setting the average loudness for a “programme” - which in the case of an audio library, especially one sourced from many places, works best at the granularity of a single file. You wouldn’t want the (intentionally) quietest clip ‘normalised’ to be even quieter just on the basis that most of the rest of your clips are super-compressed loudness-war era music.
So to do that it needs to pre-process the entire file and calculate its “average loudness” as the basis for adjustments. And there is no ‘entire file’ on a track until it’s been rendered. Even if we tried to preview render it and fake one, it still wouldn’t do what would sanely be wanted, because any localised volume control on clips would happen before the ‘track audio’ and then the normalisation would just fight it to smooth the average again.
[* and you’d have to re-analyse it every time anything changes in the audio track]
Either will work, which to choose depends on whether you want that setting for all uses of the clip or just in the one timeline instance.
Applying it individually to each ‘programme’ is precisely its purpose. That may not suit how you’ve cut your audio clips in this project, but in general that’s exactly how it’s designed to work.
If you’re using a new enough kdenlive, you can apply and edit effects on multiple clips simultaneously. I haven’t tried that with this (mostly because I usually want to tweak the actual target loudness individually for each clip), but see the docs for how that works.
I hope I don’t seem argumentative. I appreciate your input. I do want to point out that you did say
(I’m assuming)
It doesn’t make sense to me why they would let you apply 2-pass to the track if it didn’t do anything. Also, I am on the latest stable 24.12.1. If it can work on a file, it should be possible for it to work on a stream of audio, like a track. I think I will be submitting a bug report and see what comes of it. Thanks for your input.
Because we don’t (yet) have a mechanism to blacklist effects in just the contexts where they don’t make sense.
Anything is possible, that doesn’t make it practical or sensible. Normalising is the first thing you should do with audio - it makes no sense to be doing that operation after per-clip volume controls and other signal processing operations that might effect the levels.
Anyway, it’s known that someone has tried this now, and will be looked at.
I also just found this before submitting my own:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=441451
I also did a simple test against a file in the project bin, and that does seem to work, so thank you. I’m saved from clicking 50 analyze buttons.
Applying it as a bin effect is almost certainly the correct place if you’re cutting your clip into 50 pieces and want them all normalised to the same baseline. That makes it happen before other processing occurs elsewhere.
I spoke too soon. When applying to files in the project bin, it is hit or miss cut to cut which ones will get the loudness and which won’t. It seems that applying to every cut and clicking analyze is the only option now. This is rather impractical for my projects.
Ok, that sounds like a bug … even if I’m a little skeptical about it actually being ‘random’ - but there’s work in progress with this now, so let’s see what that shakes out and changes.
Yes, the Normalise (2 pass) effect must always be applied directly to the clip. (It doesn’t work in master or track.) The error was there for years, but was fixed sometime in 2024.
Then it was there again, so I stopped using it. Now I notice that it works again with the latest version: 24.12.0. There are people who prefer the normal Normalise. This is good if you have really bad recordings with big volume differences, it compensates for that properly. I don’t like it though, because this continuous volume adjustment can sometimes result in volume pumping that you can hear. Normalize (2 pass) seems to be the much more professional one when it works. I will leave a comment in the bug report.
Looks like some fixes for this have just hit git. I’m not sure what time the nightly builds run, but once you see one up that’s later than ‘now’, you might want to give it a spin and let us know if it still fails at something you need from it.
It looks like it might even work on the track now, but high in the bin effect stack is still the right place to put it if you don’t want it fighting other effects.
I’m on 25.03.70 kdenlive-master-9679 from 2025-02-17 nightly
The normalize 2-pass applies to the track and completes the analyze process, but is not applied to all cuts in the track.
I fill try using the project bin clips
Please do follow up to 441451 – Normalize (2 pass) doesn't work on channel level or cut audio clips. with details of any issues you can still shake out of this - preferably with some simple way that others can clearly reproduce it.