Voice clean up and loudness

Select an audio clip and open the Audio tab.

Enhance microphone audio

The same clean up the recorder offers while recording, applied afterwards to this clip. It takes out the steady noise of a room, the low rumble a desk transmits into a microphone, and it evens out the difference between your loud and quiet moments.

Doing it here rather than at record time has one clear advantage: you can hear the raw take first, and you can undo it. Doing it at record time saves you remembering.

Match loudness

Match loudness measures how loud the clip really is, over the whole clip, and applies a single gain so it lands on the Target for the project.

Two things worth understanding. It is a measurement of perceived loudness over time, not of the highest peak, which is why a quiet recording with one loud cough is handled sensibly. And it is one gain for the whole clip, not a compressor riding the level, so the shape of your delivery survives.

The order matters

Clean up first, then match the loudness. The clean up changes how loud the clip is, so measuring before it and applying the gain after would land you somewhere else.

Cilevi does them in that order. It is worth knowing because it explains why the number you measured before switching on the clean up is not the number you end up with.

What target to use

If you are publishing to YouTube, Instagram or TikTok, all of them normalise loudness on their side anyway, so the important thing is consistency between your own videos rather than hitting an exact figure. Set the project target once and leave it.