Re: [TCLUG:14508] Normalizing MP3s

[Dave Sherohman <esper@usinternet.com>]

Philip C Mendelsohn said:
> I'm only going to post once one this, more because it's a *monstrous* bone
> of contention, and the "cross-discipline" communication is a good thing:

Well, I'm going to reply anyhow...

> Normalizing is absolutely no more than a pre-programmed change in the
> volume knob

Yep.

> (for whoever said that that was an "unacceptable" solution.)

That would be me, and I'm also the one who asked the question in the first
place.  My intent in the comment you're referring to was that having to
_manually_ change the volume for each track is unacceptable.

> If it works for you, great.  It very likely may not, given some of the
> really irresponsible uses of digital audio and recording these days.  Come
> on -- 96+dB of dynamic range and we compress it to less than 3dB?  That's
> better than analog *how???*

Heh...  Good point.

> Anyway, if you have a severly overcompressed
> source (not hard to come by) and try and put it next to a song that is not
> overcompressed, normalizing won't help.

Sure it will - you'll be able to hear it well enough to tell that it sounds
lousy, instead of straining to hear anything at all.  (Yes, I'm exaggerating
a bit, but not all that much...)

> A much better solution (for fidelity and success in equalizing apparent
> volume of songs) is to turn the softest one up as high as you can, and
> then adjust the rest *DOWN* to match.

OK, then where do I find a piece of software that normalizes everything to
the minimum volume instead of the maximum volume?

Regardless of where or how the normalization is done, for me (a person who
tends to listen to CDs of 60-year-old tango records and not notice that they
sound scratchy until someone else points it out to me), any solution that
requires me to manually touch a volume control to equalize the apparent
loudness of tracks from different sources is inherently inferior to a
solution that handles it automatically.

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