Should I Normalize all my tracks?

Question

I am newer to working with Logic Pro 7.1
I am working on a personal recording project now and was wondering if I should normalize all of my audio tracks after recording them?
Pros? Cos?
Does it hurt anything to do that?

Answer 1

the thing is, it's not as simple as just maximising everything at all times to use the maximum bits possible at all times to guarantee the best fidelity... ideally you should be attentive with you recording levels so as to use your dynamic range as best as possible as you record. boosting the recorded data later to fill up the bits is not necessarily going to improve things later, you'll bring your noise floor up to as loud as possible on every single take, and if some of your takes have been recorded at too low a level, you'll end up hearing a lot more noise than otherwise. plus, don't forget that maximising is a digital mathematical operation that is being performed on your audio files, it's not as simple as the dumbed-down charts you see in reference manuals to explain the principle of how maximising works... all sorts of data averaging and rounding will happen when you maximise, different depending on what software does it, what audio engine is in play etc etc.
also, don't forget that the recorded audio in logic is then translated internally to the 32 bit float of the audio engine, so the mixing and effects processing of your audio at that level is on a different scale to the recording format. this means that even if you have say 24 bit audio files that were recorded at a conservative level in the first instance, they are not going to be penalised too much in further plug in processing with plug ins etc because it's a whole different ballgame inside the box.
that said, there's certainly a place for maximising, I do it reasonably often myself. but at the end of the day, the old-school recording principles still apply: set your levels carefully and dutifully for every source that you are recording to get as good, clean and hot a signal into your DAW as you can. also the other best advice for ideal dynamic range in this day and age is - always work at 24 bit, the benefits completely eclipse the drawback of ever so slight extra CPU and disk resources and the slightly larger filesizes.