On Thu, 24 Mar 2016 06:19:01 +0000 Yassin Philip <philcm(a)gnu.org> wrote: Only recently did I find such staggering effect this normalization, when exporting a quiet piece that was very likely recorded not loud enough. The product of this mathematical, static, processing was not nice at all. Now I have created an alternate export profile, "SansNorm", that I will always use until I get to know more about why people rely on this kind of extra processing enough to have as a default in Ardour. Maybe the problem was actually with the too soft recording, but I'll nevertheless not use it for a few months. Up to now, from what I have learned, if someone wants a wall of sound, then the way is to use an appropriate compressor technique. In all mixing articles and videos I have seen, there was no attention towards this normalization process. Maybe it is something taken for granted that no-one mentions and all DAWs perform ? I don't know. As for the piece, it was recorded with the Mixbus 3.2 version of Ardour. There is one thing I have tried: at the beginning and at the end there is this 'wind in the forest' noise, with some barn door creaking. Well, the same noise is put in the verses, at the exact same level. I am not sure about the subliminal effect it can have, although sometimes I subjectively feel that there's some 'openess' in the verses because the mind perceives, registers this feeling of wind. There's some grunting too, but the guy, me, that plays guitar has not learned yet no to do that ! I guess it goes along with the barn door creaking :) Cordialement.