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<span class="hdr">A fast PCM WAV normalizer</span> 
<p class="para">For many tasks involving audio (e.g. compressing WAV files to 
  MP3), it's nice to have a utility which can normalize audio files. The purpose 
  of this is to make all audio files sound equally loud. I used to use CoolEdit 
  (from Syntrillium) to do this task, but since this audio editor is capable of 
  doing much more than just normalizing waves, it's a bit slow for this task. 
  Besides, it cannot be easily called from a batch file. </p>
<p> So I looked for a better alternative, but found none. That was when I decided 
  to write my own normalizer. It's a small Win32 console mode application called 
  <i>normalize</i>. It can handle 8-bit and 16-bit PCM WAV files of up to 4 GBs 
  (larger WAV files are not possible anyway), and it is fast. Hell, faster than 
  your disk I/O anyway. </p>
    
<p> <span class="parab">How it works</span><br>
  It works like this: if you do not specify an amplification factor (either just 
  as a factor or in decibels), it will first search the whole file for the negative 
  and positive peaks. Then it will divide either 32767 or 127 (depending on whether 
  the file is 16-bit or 8-bit) by the highest amplitude found (negative or positive, 
  whichever is greater), and the result is the amplification factor. A substitution 
  table is built in memory that contains the new (amplified) sample value for 
  each possible input value. Thus the time-consuming task of doing floating-point 
  multiplication has to be done only once (and at most 65536 multiplications).<br>
  When these steps have been completed, normalize will pass over the file again, reading 
  blocks of 64 KB to memory, amplifying them (by substituting sample values from 
  the table), and writing them back to the file (of course overwriting the original 
  data).</p>
<p><span class="parab">Fighting spurious peaks</span><br>
  Sometimes WAV files have peak samples that occur so rarely or in non-critical 
  passages that it can be afforded to clip them without introducing audible artifacts. 
  If these are not clipped, they prevent normalizing the whole file to "normal" 
  levels (as by default normalize does not clip any sample at all). To help combat 
  this problem, Lapo Luchini contributed some code which internally produces a 
  full statistic of the sample values and only considers peak values that have 
  a given percentile in the statistic. It's called "smartpeak" (-s option); 
  start with a percentile of 99.99% and decrease if necessary.</p>
  <p>
      <span class="parab">Speed</span><br>
     On an AMD Athlon 1.1 GHz with an IBM 30 GB/7200 RPM/UDMA100 hard
    disk,  a 1.3 GB WAV file can be normalized in about 3 minutes.
  </p>
    <p>
      <span class="parab">Improving Speed</span><br>
       About the biggest speed gain can be achieved when using two hard disks
      instead of one. On one disk you put the source file, and let normalize
      write the output to a file on the other disk. Thus both disks can be
      working at the same time (one reading, the other writing), and the
      effective speed you get will be about the physical write speed of your
      disk. If you use only one disk, it will have to seek every now and then
      to read new data, and then again to write the normalized data back.
    </p>
    
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                <span class="parab">Download</span> 
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            <p> If you're looking for normalize-0.3x-beta: forget it, it's gone. 
              I've figured out that the world doesn't need<br>
              MMX/SSE/SIMD support for peak sample searching because everybody 
              has got fast processors<br>
              but very few people have got high-speed SCSI/RAID systems. So... 
              since I don't have time to merge<br>
              these two, I decided to get rid of the beta since it doesn't really 
              make sense. Believe me.</p>
                
            <p> <span class="parab">Get <a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize0253.zip">normalize-0.253</a></span> (Win32 CLI)<br>
            (Older versions: <a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize025.zip">normalize-0.252</a> <a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize023.zip"></a><a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize024.zip"></a><a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize0241.zip"></a><a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize025.zip">normalize-0.25</a> <a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize023.zip"></a><a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize024.zip"></a><a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize0241.zip">normalize-0.241</a> <a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize023.zip"></a><a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize024.zip">normalize-0.24</a> <a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize023.zip">normalize-0.23<br>
            </a><a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize023.zip">normalize-0.23</a> <a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize022.zip">normalize-0.22</a> <a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize021.zip">normalize-0.21</a>)</p>
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                <b>Usage</b> 
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            <pre class="prefmt">normalize v0.253 (c) 2000-2004 Manuel Kasper &lt;mk@neon1.net&gt;.<br>All rights reserved.<br>smartpeak code by Lapo Luchini &lt;lapo@lapo.it&gt;.<br>Visit http://neon1.net/ for updates.

    Usage:  normalize [flags] input-file

        -l &lt;ratio&gt;   don't find peaks but multiply each sample by &lt;ratio&gt;
        -a &lt;level&gt;   don't find peaks; amplify by &lt;level&gt; (given in dB)
        -m &lt;percent&gt; normalize to &lt;percent&gt; (default 100)
        -s &lt;percent&gt; smartpeak: count as a peak only a signal that has the
	             given percentile (50%-100%)
        -x &lt;level&gt;   abort if gain increase is smaller than &lt;level&gt; (in dB)
        -p           prompt before starting normalization
        -b &lt;size&gt;    specify I/O buffer size (in KB; 16..16384; default 64)
        -o &lt;file&gt;    write output to &lt;file&gt; (instead of overwriting original)
        -q           quiet (no screen output)
        -d           don't abort batch if user skips normalization of one file
        -h           display this help

    error levels: 0 = no error, 1 = I/O error, 2 = parameter error,
                  3 = no amplification required, 4 = out of memory,
                  5 = user abort

        - wildcards are allowed in 'input-file' (e.g. normalize *.wav)
        - 'input-file' needs to be a PCM WAV file.</pre> 
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          <td bgcolor="#9DB5E6" class="parab"> <b>Get the source code</b> </td>
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            <p>I have finally decided to release the source code to normalize 
              due to numerous requests.<br>
              I hereby place it under the <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt" target="_blank">GNU 
              General Public License</a>.<br>
              You can download the source code from here:<br>
              Get <a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalize-src.zip" class="parab" style="">normalize-0.253 source 
              code</a></p>
            <p>Note that there are no comments in the source - I have not written 
              it with the intent to release it.<br>
              <span class="parab">I will not answer any questions concerning the 
              source code, so please don't ask.</span> Thank you.</p>
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<p><span class="parab">But I want a GUI!</span><br>
  Bruce Heller made a very nice GUI for those of you who don't like fiddling around 
  with command line arguments. His website was originally found at <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20050214115515/http://bheller.com/index01.htm" target="_blank">http://www.bheller.com/</a> (now links to Archive.org). 
  Thanks, Bruce!
</p>
<p><span class="parab">From Bruce on the GUI:</span><br>
This is the second release of the GUI, new stuff are :
<ul>
  <li>Addition of the batch processing mode</li>
  <li>Possibility to translate the GUI easily thanks to a .ini file ;)</li>
</ul>

If you want to do a translation of the GUI in your language, do not hesitate, it's quite easy, just add a section of the name of the language in the .ini file and translate sentences. :)
Send me (Bruce) your translations to my email adress.
If I did a mistake (english is not my native language), please tell me where so I can correct it ;)
<br><br>
Please don’t look at the GUI code; it’s not commented or well coded but hey ! It works ! ;)
</p>
<p><span class="parab">License</span><br>
  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under 
  the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software 
  Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.<br>
  normalize is © 2000-2004 Manuel Kasper. All rights reserved.</p>
<p>
      <span class="parab">Thanks</span><br>
       Big thanks go to <span class="parab">Georges Wanderstok</span>; he
      invested much time to do some thorough tests on normalize and sent me
      many good suggestions. Some of them have already been incorporated in
      v0.21, others will be integrated in the next versions. Thank you,
      Georges!<br>
  Thanks also to <span class="parab">Terje Mathisen</span> for providing me with 
  some ideas to improve the speed of normalize... Thanks to him normalize now 
  has MMX and SSE support for the min/max sample scanner.<br>
  I also want to thank <span class="parab">Lapo Luchini</span> for contributing 
  the smartpeak search code.</p>
    <p class="parab">
      Notes/Bugs/Caveats
    </p>
    <ul>
      <li>
        while normalize internally uses plain factors for calculation, the
        values displayed in dB are calculated as follows:<br>
         [dB] = 20 * log(ratio)<br>
         (where log is the base-10 logarithm) - thus a factor of 2 is (almost)
        equal to 6 dB
      </li>
      <li>
        error levels are not always correct (especially if a really fatal error
        happens); don't rely on them in important applications
      </li>
      <li>
        I should forget about using percents and always use decibels
      </li>
      <li>
        parameter parsing ought to be a bit more intelligent; for example you
        can't put any parameters after the file name, etc.
      </li>
    </ul>
    
<p class="parab">Links</p>
<ul>
  <li>Adam Brewster is working on a Macintosh port, <a href="http://www.geocities.com/macvauthor/normalize.html" target="_blank">check out his site</a> - he's made a working preliminary version 
    available for download there...</li>
</ul>
<p><span class="parab">Disclaimer</span><font size="-1"><br>
  </font> <a href="https://neon1.net/prog/disclaimer.html">Read this</a> (if you care) </p>
    <p class="parab">
      Version history
    </p>
    
<p><span class="parab">0.253</span> - the absolute value of the amplification factor is now used when comparing with the -x option (thanks to Dave Case for reporting this)</p>
<p><span class="parab">0.252</span> - the WAV reader now skips  all unknown subchunks</p>
<p><span class="parab">0.25</span> - incorporated some code contributed by Lapo 
  Luchini to help fight "spurious peaks"</p>
<p><span class="parab">0.241</span> - added '-d' flag (don't abort) - see usage 
  above </p>
    
<p><span class="parab">0.24</span> - Jack Vande Bunte suggested to add wildcard 
  support. Here it is! Now you can call normalize like this: 'normalize *.wav' 
  and it will normalize all files with a .wav extension in the current directory. 
</p>
    
<p><span class="parab">0.232</span> - I seriously messed up something in the 
  compile of the v0.231 which went to the website (see the red box above). This 
  is fixed now. No changes to the code were made in this release. </p>
    <p>
      <span class="parab">0.231</span> - normalizing a file consisting only of
      null samples (digital silence) resulted in the output being all -32768
      samples (or maybe even a crash). Thanks again to Georges Wanderstok for
      pointing this out.<br>
       (Note: this is not fixed yet in 0.3-beta)
    </p>
    <p>
      <span class="parab">0.23</span> - the -o option was defunct for 16-bit
      WAV files - all it did was to write silence to the output file. Fixed
      this one now (forgot to move two lines of code while I was changing the
      parameter parser); thanks to <i>Cyber</i> who brought this to my
      attention.<span class="parab"><br>
      <br>
       0.22</span> - samples are now clipped correctly when "over-normalizing"
      - instead of producing overflows and very strange results, they're just
      clipped to the highest/lowest possible sample value (no speed penalty
      since normalize is table-driven)
    </p>
    <p>
      <span class="parab">0.21 -</span> added new options: -p, -x, -m, -o;
      changed default buffer size to 64 KB (faster on most systems)
    </p>
    <p>
      <span class="parab">0.1.2</span> - minor cosmetic changes; added a timer
      which tells you how long it took; added the '-q' switch which disables
      all screen output (useful in batch scripts) - first version to be
      released
    </p>
    <p>
      <span class="parab">0.1.1</span> - some small changes to handle the
      strange 'fact' header that some audio recorders insert (never released)
    </p>
    <p>
      <span class="parab">0.1</span> - made it table-driven: speed is now MUCH
      better (never released)
    </p>
    <p>
      <span class="parab">0.0.1</span> - first version. It worked. :) (never
      released)
    </p>
    <hr size="1">
<span class="paras">CLI © 2000-2004 by <font color="#009900">Manuel Kasper</font> 
&lt;<a href="mailto:mk@neon1.net">mk@neon1.net</a>&gt;. All rights reserved.</span><br>
<span class="paras">GUI © 2001 by <font color="#009900">Bruce Heller</font> 
&lt;<a href="mailto:bheller@bheller.com">bheller@bheller.com</a>&gt;. All rights reserved.</span> 
<br><br>
<span class="paras">Original website at <a href="https://neon1.net/prog/normalizer.html">https://neon1.net/prog/normalizer.html</a>.<br>
The source code for both the command-line interface (CLI) and the graphical user interface (GUI)
are now available on GitHub at <a href="https://github.com/mesheets/NormalizeCLI/">GitHub.com/NormalizeCLI</a>.</span>

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