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SteveK50 · Posted - Sun May 11, 2003 9:38 am

Hi,

I'm sure there's a buzzword for what I'm looking for... but I'm not too "musically-inclined"... so bear with me.

I want to burn a CD from music I've collected from various sources... but problem I'm still having is that the songs are not of the same "volume level"... and I have to keep playing with my car's radio/CD volume for each song. I've used CoolEdit 2000, Transform/Amplitude/Normalize, which has helped but just isn't quite it.

What can I use to... "normalize" an entire folder's worth of songs to each other?? Is there a CoolEdit 2000 plugin?? A 3rd party App?

BTW, if it matters, some songs are 160Kbps, some at 128 and some at 192. The other info is the same... 44100/16/stereo.

Thanks for anyone's help!!
Steve

Andrew Rose · Location: United Kingdom

If normalising doesn't fix it I'm afraid you'll have to use your ears. The reason they all sound different at this stage is the degree to which the recordings have been compressed or hard-limited in order to give the impression of increased volume.

Assuming the songs are all normalised to the same level, select the quietest-sounding one and, using this as a benchmark, reduce the overall levels on the other songs one by one until they're roughly the same. Sounds laborious I know but it shouldn't take that long...

Graeme · Member Location: Spain

Normalising won't help with this problem - it merely raises the overall amplitude of each track to whatever peak level you have set.

As Andrew has already said (in a roundabout way) is that the ear averages out levels and the perceived volume has liitle or no relationship to the peak levels - a highly compressed recording will sound 'louder' than an uncompressed one.

If you do a forum search on RMS averaging, you'll find a lot of discussion about this and a couple of means to achieve the required result. Unfortunately, these require CE Pro and are not applicable to CE2000.

There are some third party apps around - Volume Balancer is probably the best known of these - but it's probably just as quick to do it by ear. Personally, I prefer this method, since Volume Balancer does apply additional compression to some tracks to achieve its end and I would prefer this not to happen.