Take the tour ×  I often make lengthy recordings of spoken word
for Internet distribution - lectures, public debates, etc. The
resulting wave files have a highly uneven level - from whisper-
quiet (questions from the audience) to moderate (main speakers,
close to the mic) to very high (applause, etc.) It is quite
tedious to go over a two-hour long wave file, select it bits but
bits and manually amplify or de-amplify parts as needed to
achieve some uniformity.  I thought this would be an obvious
feature to include in various sound editing apps (I'm on
Windows), but in fact the opposite is the case. The various
"normalize" functions only work across multiple tracks, but not
within a single waveform. I use Sony Sound Forge primarily, and
Sony's support tells me nothing like I need is available there.
I don't really know much about sound processing, so perhaps
there is something obvious that escapes me. Basically, I'm
imagining a feature that would "even out" the volume within a
single waveform. (Normalization do