Compression in mic or in post?

[Michael]

heh, it might have been one of mine actually. I used to normalize, compress and normalize again. I used to do it because I felt that the compressor was more effective on a stronger signal. The real truth of the matter though was that my signal was too weak in the first place which means I was treating a symptom, not the problem.

Generally speaking, you want to do noise removal closer to the end, and definitely after any amplification. If you remove noise first, whatever noise is left then gets amplified by the normalize and it's not quite as clear.

Really, what you want is to be recording at as high an input volume as you can without clipping. The bulk of the track won't be as high though, just the peaks, so you compress it from there to even things out, and normalize to bring it back up to about a -1db baseline. Some people use -1, others use 0. I don't know that it really matters but I have found that when I use a 0db normalized track and overlay it on top of a gameplay video or with my licensed background music, sometimes the video volume will clip, even though the audio track by itself doesn't. That's why I switched to -1db.

Thanks, that makes sense to me now, it seems a bit stupid now amplifying whatever noise is left, I will have to see if you have any newer audio tutorials on your channel. I am getting more into audio, theres a lot I dont understand but do because it sounds right to me and was in a tutorial but that probably isnt the best way to go about it.

I had some clipping today and had to adjust the levels right down on the mic and I did just that, get the inputs as high as possible without distortion etc the output file sounds decent but even better when normalized and adding a compressor.

Something I used to use a lot was bass boost but I dont think I need it, my voice is quite bassy without it and I think now it sounds more distorted if anything with that added. Treble boost on the new mic output sounds a bit tinny to me.