A common question a lot of engineers & producer have is whether they should normalize or not upon exporting?

The short answer is no.

The reason why we suggest avoiding normalizing is because you lose all of your headroom when you do this.

What normalizing is doing is it's taking the highest peak of your audio file & raising it to 0dB. It's also raising everything else by the same amount.

It does make the track louder; however, it can bring issues.

One big issue it can bring is if you're sending a stereo mix to a mastering engineer, normalizing it will take away all of the headroom. Mastering engineers need headroom to work.

Another issue is if you're sending track outs to your mix engineer. If you choose to normalize, each track's highest peak will be brought to 0dB & they won't have any headroom on any of the tracks. They can turn it down on their end, but it's just creating unnecessary work for everyone & it affects the quality too!

Which brings us to our last reason to avoid normalizing your tracks. A lot of times raising your highest peak to 0dB with normalizing can cause quality issues such as clipping, crackling, distortion, & unwanted artifacts. Usually tracks that have been normalized sound pretty bad.

If you're looking to raise the overall loudness of your track, we suggest using a limiter instead!