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[jgreen]

I would like to alter the artist's original work, in order to make it more convenient to listen to. 

Specifically: 
I would like to normalize, or otherwise filter Elton John's track, "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me".  The problem I have with it is that it starts very very quiet and increases its volume in stairsteps, until it's really loud.  If I turn it up at the start, I'm running to go turn it down by the middle.  Is there a filter in Media Editor or Audacity that can deal with this?

  I could do a reverse fade, but the steppiness of the volume increases means that there would still be neck-snapping changes in volume.  What I want to do is Normalize the peaks as well as the troughs of the waves.  Anything?

[Alex B]

http://comped.brown.edu/handouts/index.php/Audacity#Compressor

[jgreen]

Alex, I just tried your link, and that's a great idea, but that's not what I want to do, I believe.  I want to preserve the dynamic range (as a ratio) and raise the amplitude of both lows and highs so that they mach the range heard later in the track.  Or I could lower the amplitude of the later sections, preserving dynamic range there (as a ratio).  But because the amplitude steps up, I have  no seamless approach to this, AFAIK.

[jgreen]

FWIW, the function I was looking for is the "Envelope", which, when selected highlights the entire track and allows you to selectively increase or decrease amplitude.  You can do this for the entire range or certain sections, and ease-in/out to the unaffected segments.  This does have the unintended effect of increasing the "attack" of percusion, but I'll live with it, since my main goal of getting the front of the song to match the back is achieved.

Thanks, Alex B for your input, and thank you jriver for tolerating this extremely OT thread. (Or maybe you just missed it the first time around.)