Sound Card's Built-In Compressor/Limiter

[bernie]

There's lots of discussion about normalizing the volume level of karaoke tracks. Threads range from Hoster processing to external, hardware compressors/limiters. But I haven't seen any discussion of a feature many of us already have available to us... normalization via the sound card itself.

I typically load "drivers only" for my cards, but a recent re-install of my Sound Blaster accidentally included the "suite of apps". Before deleting what I assumed was useless crap, I played with the FX features and was surprised to find that normalization was one of the listed effects.

I engaged it on one of my systems and then added several known problematic songs to Hoster's playlist. Tracks by Sweet Georgia Brown are typically too-loud and tracks by Pioneer are typically too-quiet. Played back-to-back these tracks would normally require significant mixer board adjustments to compensate. With normalization engaged, that wasn't necessary.

I ran a show with the sound card's normalization engaged and barely touched the mixer level for the karaoke track all night. It worked that well.

Is this an ideal solution? No, it's a poor man's implemention of compression and to a trained ear you can hear it's effect. But for karaoke in a noisy environment the artifacts are not detectable.

If you've got a Sound Blaster card evaluate it for yourself. Where you'll find it is dependant on the card's vintage. On my XFi Fatal1ty it was a pull-down FX effect called "Compressor" available from the Creative Console Launcher. On my old Live! it was accessed via AudioHQ/EAX Control Panel and the effect was called "Normalizer".

I don't know if other brands of sound cards have a similar feature, but with the Sound Blaster family being so prolific, it's a free stop-gap fix for many of us. Try it, you may like it.