Normalizing an audio file with PyDub

Sometimes you'll have audio files where the speech is loud in some portions and quiet in others. Having this variance in volume can hinder transcription.

Luckily, PyDub's effects module has a function called normalize() which finds the maximum volume of an AudioSegment, then adjusts the rest of the AudioSegment to be in proportion. This means the quiet parts will get a volume boost.

You can listen to an example of an audio file which starts as loud then goes quiet, loud_then_quiet.wav, here.

In this exercise, you'll use normalize() to normalize the volume of our file, making it sound more like this.

This exercise is part of the course

Spoken Language Processing in Python

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Exercise instructions

Import AudioSegment from PyDub and normalize from the PyDub's effects module.
Import the target audio file, loud_then_quiet.wav and save it to loud_then_quiet.
Normalize the imported audio file using the normalize() function and save it to normalized_loud_then_quiet.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Import AudioSegment and normalize
from pydub import ____
from pydub.effects import ____

# Import target audio file
loud_then_quiet = AudioSegment.from_file(____)

# Normalize target audio file
normalized_loud_then_quiet = ____(____)

Edit and Run Code