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mp3 Audio OUTPUT volume normalizer? Any such thing?

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Jimdoria:
Not to be a fly in the ointment, but I just gotta comment on this:

His life savings is wrapped up in his system and all those files. And it would be a serious problem if the audio quality was lessened... but he doesn't have the capacity to back up all the files at this point.
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The technical term for this condition is MASSIVE STUPIDITY.

Your friend has "speakers that won't fit into your car" but he can't be bothered to go to an office supply store and drop $60-$100 on a external USB drive? That would hold 80-120GB of data?

Removable media has never been as cheap, copious, and easy to use as it is right now. There's really no excuse for having one and only one copy of ANY critical file sitting around without a backup. Much less an entire collection of them.

Do your firend the biggest favor you could ever do. Sit him down, and ask him how important the sound quality of his audio files is to him. Then ask him to imagine that the sound quality of every one of those precious files has suddenly dropped to ZERO. Ask him to imagine how he would feel if, after hearing a weird little click from inside his computer, he found that in that fraction of a second his entire music collection was simply GONE, corrupted, hopelessly unrecoverable. It can happen. No, actually IT WILL HAPPEN. Statistically it's just a question of when.

Then offer to go with him to the computer store or the office supplies store and pick out a nice, cheap, large USB hard drive, take it home and help him set it up. Don't leave him by himself until you're sure the backup software has run successfully.

Friends don't let friends compute without backups.

rpyron:
and on the flipside, anyone know a tool that will do the opposite, ie batch gain changes (boosting)

I have a number of (MP3) files where the volume is too low - I've done some fiddling with a couple of apps and it seems boosting the gain by about 10db does the trick nicely

2 problems with this -

    1) it has to be done on a file by file basis (very tedious)
    2) it entails reencoding to a new file (or has done in the apps I've tried) - this is a no-no as the files are already in a lossy format and re-encoding cannot be a good thing...

any suggestions/ideas?

Target
-Target (March 30, 2008, 07:20 PM)
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MP3Gain is your friend. By default, it normalizes every file (or album) to 89 dB, but you can change that.

You can select a bunch of files and have them all normalized to the same level. I do this with old-time radio files.

Or you can select all the files in an album, and have MP3Gain adjust them all by the same relative amount. This is particularly useful for classical music.

BTW, the original poster's friend, who does not have enough room to back up everything, doesn't have to convert everything all at once. Copy 10 or 100 or 1000 files to a new directory and convert the copies; if he is pleased with the results, copy them back over the originals. Lather, rinse, and repeat until done.

f0dder:
Does mp3gain re-process the audio stream, or does it just add a 'gain' tag to the files? And wrt. normalizing to different dB levels, does this require re-processing, or just changing some player settings?

Imho you'd need both per-track and per-album gain levels, and choose one depending on the mode you're currently listening - trackgain can be horrible if you're listening to an entire album, if it hasn't been "loudness-mastered" :)

Ampa:
fodder: mp3gain writes both a track gain and album gain tag to the file. It does NOT change the audio in anyway.

target: mp3gain will not only reduce loud tracks, but also boost quiet tracks.

Target:
gain will not only reduce loud tracks, but also boost quiet tracks
-Ampa (April 07, 2008, 08:07 AM)
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COOL!! - I've had this in my kit for years, but never thought about using it this way   :huh::-[

Leads me to wonder what else I've got that I'm not really using (at least not 'fully')??  :-\

Target

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