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Normalizing Your Music Library


Flare4War
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Normalizing a music collection? This is about the worst thing I've ever heard on these forums

And thats why you should GO AWAY AND NEVER COME BACK.

seriously tho, this is a good question. I tend to use itunes (sound check feature) but that really sucks, I wouldn't recommend it, all it does is quieten everything and stuff still isn't at the same volume :( If anyone knows of anything better, i'm listening also :)

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When did he say anything about perceived volume? You've made your point Brandon, stop posting the same thing. Consider this a warning.

Anyway, it depends on what format your music collection is in. If you're dealing with lossless stuff, you might check out Goldwave. You can do batch processing and normalize everything to the same peak volume. Now, this isn't going to affect perceived volume if everything is already at peak 0dB, but it's a start.

For MP3s, check out MP3gain: http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/

Although I've heard iTunes does a good job of this too.

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Do you need to normalize it to access it somewhere else or would realtime normalizing on your PC itself be a reasonable alternative ?

No, the problem is I listen to mp3's in my car using a USB drive and some songs are too loud and some are too quiet. So I'm always having to fiddle with the volume.

I highly recommend mp3gain, as well. For car/portable listening especially, I despise big jumps in volume from track to track--this basically nondestructively eliminates the problem, as long as the "volume" is kept perhaps 95 and below.

Sounds like a lot of people are pleased with this mp3Gain. When you say "...kept perhaps 95 and below." what are you referring to specifically?

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Semi-on-topic here:

If we are talking about adjusting perceived volume, RMS metering could be used for dealing with the differences in perceived volume between stuff that's has clipped peaks and heavy compression, and more dynamic material. Dunno software that does this, but it seems like there's a tag in mp3 files (or just in the iTunes library, idunno) that could be adjusted. Wouldn't be perfect, but unless I'm missing something, it'd be a good way to level things out a bit.

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No, the problem is I listen to mp3's in my car using a USB drive and some songs are too loud and some are too quiet. So I'm always having to fiddle with the volume.

Sounds like a lot of people are pleased with this mp3Gain. When you say "...kept perhaps 95 and below." what are you referring to specifically?

When you open up mp3gain, the main "option" is to choose the Target "Normal" Volume. I always choose 95, and then apply that to every file I've dragged into it, and I almost never encounter any distorted sound. If it's background music/solo piano, etc, then I'm a bit more careful--somewhere from 90 to 93, depending.

Also, I don't really have much chance to look this up to verify at the moment, but if I remember right, RMS/perceived volume *is* what mp3gain adjusts, and it's 100% reversible--I believe it too just edits the tag portion of the mp3s, but the changes always work in Winamp, on car mp3/CD players, etc, at least for me.

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Semi-on-topic here:

If we are talking about adjusting perceived volume, RMS metering could be used for dealing with the differences in perceived volume between stuff that's has clipped peaks and heavy compression, and more dynamic material. Dunno software that does this, but it seems like there's a tag in mp3 files (or just in the iTunes library, idunno) that could be adjusted. Wouldn't be perfect, but unless I'm missing something, it'd be a good way to level things out a bit.

Good points here. -12db is probably a decent RMS range, that's why I aim for with most songs.. I've seen electronica go to like -6db RMS though, really pushing it!

Don't iPods and things like that have some kind of auto-leveling with audio? I don't usually have to adjust volumes at all between songs but I have never used a USB stick by itself.. And the USB stick does auto-shuffle with the songs doesn't it? Hmmmm...

Someone with more experience in normalizing RMS could help out here methinks :<

For car/portable listening especially,

Also good advice :nicework:

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MP3Gain looks nice for what I'm trying to do. My brother and I are going to split the cost on it and get the program, but I'll still be keeping an eye on this thread in case anyone has other recommendations.

Thanks for the feedback, guys. And thanks Zircon and Moseph for the link.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just wanted to bump this and say thanks again. We've been using MP3Gain and it works wonderfully. It's exactly what we was looking for.

So anyways, my bro just wanted me to shout out again and say thanks. I should have asked about this a long, long time ago.

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I have a semi-related question:

some of the Mp3s I download or have had for a long time get this really staticy screechy noise to them that really is murder on the ears.

Is this the "loss" that people talk about when they talk about MP3s? I've only ever seen it happen in that format.

If there is a way to remove that screechy grating noise, I'd be a heppy heppy "ket".

Or is this just me and my computer?

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MP3Gain looks nice for what I'm trying to do. My brother and I are going to split the cost on it and get the program

Nothing breaks the bank like a $0 program, eh?

More seriously, been a faithful user of MP3Gain for years now. It works (volumetric) wonders! :-D

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I have a semi-related question:

some of the Mp3s I download or have had for a long time get this really staticy screechy noise to them that really is murder on the ears.

Is this the "loss" that people talk about when they talk about MP3s? I've only ever seen it happen in that format.

If there is a way to remove that screechy grating noise, I'd be a heppy heppy "ket".

Or is this just me and my computer?

The "loss" found in MP3s and other compressed formats comes from the digital conversion and compression from a large .wav or CD file down to the compressed format. This loss is always constant and is always there, but it shouldn't result in massive static (and it's arguable that there is much of an effect at all on most music, depending on bitrate settings and the like.) I have MP3s that I've been holding onto since at least 2001 and they have no problems. I've never heard of digital files "degrading" over time like that, so this is interesting. Do you have bad hard drives, or were the old MP3s copied from bad hard drives or old, badly-burned CD-Rs? Those are the only causes that I can think of.

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Don't know if it is relevant, but I have a spindle of CDs that are about 6 years old, and when I tried to burn music to them, they got a loud crunchy static at a consistent area on each disc. Maybe the CDs you ripped had a similar problem, but I don't think something like that'd happen to downloaded mp3s (over time?) unless they were faulty to begin with. o_o

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