Normalising......Good or bad?

[Gopal]

Would just like to share my knowledge of normalising at this stage.

In my experience, normalising is where you set a desirable db and normalising raises the troughs in the recording to this level and compresses the peaks to this level at the same time, making the whole project play at pretty much the same level right through, which naturally destroys basically ALL dynamics in the recording. Also if you look at the waveforms after normalising you will find alot of peaks have been drastically cut and the waveform will fill the entire headroom and have a very digital and unnatural appearance to it.

I have mainly used normalising on DJ mixes that I have recorded as the DJ may have pushed the levels up on a new track he was mixing in or as is often the case the levels have gradually crept up throughout the recording.