Okay not sure if I'm asking this correctly, I'm a tad weak in the audio department, but is there a nifty method in either Audacity, Premier, or Adobe Audition that would automatically take lets say, the softest parts of a track and boost them to the same level as the loudest? For instance, when two people are speaking into a mic and one is slightly farther away, I always have to manually go in and rubberband the one speaker up when they talk, and then back down for the other.

Any way to automate this?
Is this called "normalization"?

There is a way to automate this using normalize as a command line parameter in sox. SoX (http://sox.sourceforge.net/sox.html) There is also a normalize filter in Audacity, but I seem to recall something that was a levels adjustment that didn't have quite as strong or global effect. Maybe someone else has a suggestion for something a little more refined?

Isn't this what a compressor filter does? Crank up the ratio and it should do what you're asking.

Also, I've used this in the past and it's pretty darn slick: http://web.archive.org/web/20130729204551id_/http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator/

Compressor.

Compressor for sure.

Peak normalization and RMS normalization are different. In some app.s (Sound Forge Pro for instance), The RMS normalize process can add dynamic compression. I much prefer to add compression with a good compressor plug-in where one has control over the parameters. Volume envelopes can be added to the timeline to manually normalize differences in amplitude as well.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions, going to give it a whirl tonight.

The Levelator from The Conversations Network (http://web.archive.org/web/20130729204551id_/http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator/) works well on speech without any messing around.

The "Levelator". Will second that for sure. Used a lot in the radio industry. Export a .WAV from your timeline, run it through Levelator and bring it back in to your timeline, adjust final output level. Quick, clean simple.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney