Having trouble with increasing volume

roberth74027358  wrote Hello, I have multiple files that I want to increase the volume to be at a more normal level, but I noticed that when the volume is increased, I can hear some "clicks", a little bit of distortion, even though it's not too loud. What is happening? What do i do to avoid that?

You simply can't judge files on the basis of whether you think they're loud enough or not - you can only make a judgement on how close the peaks get to 0dB. It's perfectly possible to have a file that peaks at 0dB that doesn't sound loud enough - until you turn up the volume on your amplifier!

What I mean is that the actual 'listening' level is immaterial - it's only the level of the file in reference to 0dB that counts. That said, it's still possible to have a file that's too quiet even though the maximum level does reach 0dB. When this happens, it generally means that the file has peaks that are high, but the average level is much lower. This happens quite often with speech. You can generally improve this situation quite well by using the Hard Limiter to limit just the peaks - you can often squash them by about 9dB and hardly alter the actual 'sound' at all.

So before we could offer any specific advice, we'd need to know a bit more about these files of yours, I think.