[CentOS] Normalizing WAV files

Mon Apr 21 22:46:52 UTC 2014
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On 04/20/2014 08:40 PM, Mark LaPierre wrote:
> Hey all, I've been googling trying to find a tool that I can use to
> normalize a directory full of WAV files.  I found a reference to
> normalize in the atrpms repo but it wants to clobber several of the base
> rpms.
>
> Does anyone know of a tool in CentOS 6 that can normalize a directory
> full of WAV files that I can install without hosing up my system?
>

Are you wanting to peak normalize (which will produce audio cuts of 
wildly varying loudness) or average level normalize?

Hmm, you can find 'normalize' in the Fedora repos at RPMFusion; let's 
see, here's a mirror:
ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/rpmfusion/free/fedora/releases/14/Everything/x86_64/os/normalize-0.7.7-5.fc11.x86_64.rpm

I did a 'yum install' of that above url on my x86_64 CentOS 6.5 install, 
and it only needed lame from the nux dextop repos to install cleanly.  
RPM's from the Fedora 11-14 era tend to work ok on EL6, for the most 
part, as long as you're careful what program you're talking about and 
whether it might have security issues.  If you wanted to rebuild from 
source you could grab the source RPM, if you can find it.  Since it's 
CLI the dependencies are minimal, and, well, the security impact would 
also be minimal.

See http://normalize.nongnu.org/ for the normalize tool source; it's not 
a hard build, and it can do what you really want, which is average level 
normalization (see http://normalize.nongnu.org/README.html question 
number 4).  But still expect some volume variations; there's no such 
thing as a perfect loudness normalizer.

I don't do a straight normalize anymore.  What I want is a batch 
interface to the Harrison Mixbus channel strip plugin....or a way to run 
iZotope Ozone in bath under Linux. but I digress.