Yes, that is good! Normalizing shouldn’t alter left/right balance, and you should be able to read the peak level from a whole file, and raise the level by a suitable amount.

<L>
Lou Judson
Intuitive Audio
415-883-2689

On Mar 4, 2018, at 7:13 PM, Martha Forsyth <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I have been avoiding normalizing - instead boosting by a few dB when necessary.  Somehow I'm afraid that normalizing will somehow homogenize the sound - sometimes one channel is lower than the other for realistic reasons (I'm working with field recordings) and I don't want to risk tampering with that.
> 
> Does this sound like reasonable thinking to you experts?
> 
> Martha Forsyth
> http://martha.forsyths.org
> 
> 
> On 3/4/2018 7:44 PM, Lou Judson wrote:
>> So don’t normalize!
>> 
>> (Doctor. it hurts when I do this! Well son, don’t do that!)
>> <L>
>> Lou Judson
>> Intuitive Audio
>> 415-883-2689
>> 
>> On Mar 4, 2018, at 4:33 PM, Steven Smolian <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>>> Final result.
>>> 
>>> I can keep the sound as I go from 32 to 24 to 16, with a slight less overall
>>> air around the sound at 16.  If I normalize, I get the crackles.
>