5 Easy Steps to Make Your Videos Sound Louder!

Hello all, in this quick tutorial I’ll show you (videographers, cinematographers, etc.) how to make videos sound louder.

To be a truly good film maker, you’ll need to have a basic in audio editing as well. That is simply because sound plays a very important role sitting together with video. We wouldn’t want to turn our viewers away just because we didn’t pay enough attention to the sound in our film right?

Step 1 – Unlink your audio from the video.

To unlink the audio from your video, you can simply use a video editor like Sony Vegas on the PC or even Adobe Premiere.

In fact most video editors will be able to do it, but if your video editor doesn’t do the trick, you can simply use VLC to do it.

Extracting Audio From Video in Studio One

Exporting Audio in Studio One

In my example, I used my DAW, Studio One to extract the audio from a sample video by simply dragging the video to the arrange window. The audio is then exported as a wav file so I can begin to work on the audio.

Step 2 – Process your audio.

We’re going to start processing audio in this step, so dig out your trusty audio editor.

If you don’t have one, I recommend getting Audacity. Audacity is a free audio editor which has the functions of a professional audio software. Better yet, it works on PC & Mac.

Once you’ve launched Audacity, drop in the exported audio into the arrange window and you’ll see the audio waveforms appear.

Now select the whole waveform by hitting ‘CTRL + A’ on PC or ‘Apple + A’ on Mac systems. Now under ‘Effects‘, click Normalize. Normalize is a function gives you the option to normalize audio up to a certain threshold you set.

Normalizing Audio

We can go ahead and put in 0dB, which is the highest threshold for audio. Any higher than that would result in some clipping. If you want to play it safe to make sure nothing gets clipped, you can put in a value of -0.1dB here. A very slight difference in the level of sound.

Normalizing Audio in Audacity

And finally, you’ll notice that the audio waveforms are now bigger, meaning they’re louder now.

Instead of normalizing the whole waveform, you can also select parts of the waveform to normalize. That would take more work, but if you find some parts to be still soft, you can do so.

Step 3 – Export your audio file.

Finally when we’re done with the editing, its time to export. We’ll be exporting the file as a wav file (a standard) and keeping it in 16bit/48kHz. Video files usually sync with 48kHz. Make sure not to alter the sample rate or risk having your audio and video go out of sync.

Exporting Audio in Audacity

Step 4 – Export the video with audio.

Now that you have exported your now louder audio file, the final step is to link it with your video once again.

You can do this in your video editor software by simply importing the new audio to replace the old audio. And when you show your video to your viewers, you’ll can rest assured that they’ll be able to hear your audio or music!

Last Thoughts

This is a fairly simple way to make your videos – well basically your audio in your video louder.

A great video is always accompanied with a good audible sound as well and that’s all the reason you should take care of your audio too. There are many more advanced ways to edit and improve your sound, but normalizing audio is one of the easiest ways you can do to make your sound loud.

If you’re trying to make your audio file louder still, you can try compressing and also limiting your audio. Future tutorials on those topics! For now, I hope this short tutorial gives you ability to make better videos.