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Old 12-29-2016, 11:27 AM
Doug Young's Avatar
Doug Young Doug Young is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2005
Location: Mountain View, CA
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I'm not an expert in garageband, but I'm pretty sure you can set levels and add compression with it. The controls are maybe a bit limited, since they're going for "easy and foolproof", not total control.

Are you trying to match multiple tracks like for a CD? Other DAWs give you more control, Reaper or Logic, for example. Logic has a normalize option when you save the file, tho that may not be the best idea. For laying out a CD and/or working with multiple files, I use a program called DSP-Quatro. You can put a CDs worth of files on a timeline, adjust spacing, etc, and adjust the overall level of each tune. You can also apply any VST plugin to all tracks, or any individual track.

Another useful program is Adobe Audition, which has a reasonable "match volume" feature, in addition to various file operations like normalizing, aplying plugins and so on.

I'm not clear on what you're trying to do, but my guess is that GarageBand is just too simple to give you the control you want, and it may be time to move up to a more sophisticated program. Logic, Audition, Reaper are all good DAWs that run well on the Mac. DSP-Quatro is the only CD layout program I've been able to find for the Mac (there used to be others). It does one basic thing, but it does it pretty well, providing everything you need to refine multiple tracks and burn to a redbook CD.
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