Please be kind with me because I don't know if what I'll ask is just nonsense...

Is it possible to a software normalize not just the volume (as mp3gain) but all the frequencies?
Well, it doesn’t need to be all the frequencies... just the 3 basic groups: Hi/Mid/Low frequencies.

This way the Bass/Treble of all normalized songs would sound the same!
Is there any software (or even hardware) that does that?

I mean, is it possible to make 3 separated replaygain analyses? One for hi frequencies, other for mid frequencies and other for low frequencies. After that, apply separated gains for each set of frequencies?

Thanks a lot,
-muaddib

That's not nonsense.

I'm assuming you mean this: Some songs have way more treble than others; others have more bass; others have more midrange. It's got nothing to do with what the actual songs are supposed to sound like - it's just the mastering of the CD.

You want a process that doesn't mess all the music up or re-EQ everything, but fixes tracks which obviously have too much or too little of something. Accepting that a Trance track should have more bass than a classical piece, but knowing that most Trance tracks should (probably) have a similar amount of bass, and that any that don't probably need a little correction.

Is that the kind of idea?

I'm not going to say it's impossible, because people used to say that it was impossible to do what replay gain does! In truth, Replay Gain is just less imperfect than most people assumed it could be - but it's far from perfect.

Any "Auto EQ" system I can imagine would also be far from perfect - and would make so many audible mistakes that it would be more annoying than helpful! It would insist on making the classical track have as much bass as the trance track, and it would sound terrible! But I would love to be proved wrong on this.


FWIW Multiband dynamic range compression does seem to "normalise" the EQ of most tracks that go through it - that's why everything on a single radio station usually sounds quite uniform, even though the individual CDs themselves do not. However, that would be "using a sledgehammer to crack a nut" - you'd get the result you want, but you'd change the dynamics of the music as well as the EQ.


What do I do? I have a rough idea of what sounds "right", and thankfully most things do. Where things do sound different, it's not normally a problem. If the mastering is terrible and the EQ is totally wrong, I fix it manually. But it's easier to make things worse than to make things better, and it's easier to fix things to your own "taste" or to compensate for problems in your own audio system than it is to accurately improve the sound.


Maybe someone knows of some Auto EQ out there - I remember Pioneer including it on some stereos in the 1980s, so some DSP (at least to do it badly!) must be quite easy.

Cheers,
David.

EDIT: Anyone want to try multi-band ReplayGain by album? I suspect you'd need different target levels in each band - but if you could find some that worked well across a whole genre of music, then you mig the trance track, and it would sound terrible! But I would love to be proved wrong on this.


FWIW Multiband dynamic range compression does seem to "normalise" the EQ of most tracks that go through it - that's why everything on a single radio station usually sounds quite uniform, even though the individual CDs themselves do not. However, that would be "using a sledgehammer to crack a nut" - you'd get the result you want, but you'd change the dynamics of the music as well as the EQ.


What do I do? I have a rough idea of what sounds "right", and thankfully most things do. Where things do sound different, it's not normally a problem. If the mastering is terrible and the EQ is totally wrong, I fix it manually. But it's easier to make things worse than to make things better, and it's easier to fix things to your own "taste" or to compensate for problems in your own audio system than it is to accurately improve the sound.


Maybe someone knows of some Auto EQ out there - I remember Pioneer including it on some stereos in the 1980s, so some DSP (at least to do it badly!) must be quite easy.

Cheers,
David.

EDIT: Anyone want to try multi-band ReplayGain by album? I suspect you'd need different target levels in each band - but if you could find some that worked well across a whole genre of music, then you might have a slightly useful tool!

Hi David! Thank you for the replay!


I'm glad to hear it!


Exactly!


ReplayGain is good enough for me. It gives me exactly what I expect.
If an "Auto EQ" system could achieve "near" the results Replay Gain do with the volume… I would be extremely happy!


"How the music in a radio station sounds uniform?"
That's a question that always makes me wonder...
Is Multiband dynamic range compression simply the answer?
I never liked dynamic range compression, but maybe it's the answer for my problem.
Let me tell you what my final objective is…
I have a bowling center where I constantly play music. I have converted to MP3 about a 1000 CDs to select just the songs that I like. The music's genres are basically ROCK and POP.

When I play these songs I want them to sound uniform, like in a radio station.
Replay Gain fixed the volume difference problem gracefully, but now I have the equalization difference problem, and I can tell you that it's really a problem.
How could I fix it?


That's exactly what I'm doing...
I have been using winamp's feature that let me save different equalization for each song. I listen each and every one of them and manually set the equalizer in order to every song sounds uniform.

This process is *FAR* from perfect, and after some time trying to "normalize" the equalization you start to miss judging what should be the correct equalization. At the end of the processes you have to re-touch all the playlist, and it still FAR from perfect. Man... I can tell you that this process is a PAIN IN THE A**

Right now I have about 200+ songs that I have equalized with this method, but I have other 400+ selected songs out of the playlist waiting to be equalized. Every time I think in starting the equalization process with these other songs I found something more "urgent" to do.

I thing you got the idea...
So please, what could you recommend to solve this problem?
Is the “manual method” the best one?


Anyone?


Sure I want!!

Cheers,
muaddib

Hmm... SoX includes the ability to high-pass, low-pass and notch-pass audio; which suggests a way to pipe Sox to WaveGain (easiest to work with, for this purpose) in separate passes. A tedious approach, however, since the attenuation of each pass would have to be set manually and the three output files would need to be remixed/rejoined afterward.

- M.

Steinberg has/had a DirectX plugin called Steinberg Freefilter:



You should Google around a bit after this one, as it is old (bit tricky to use too) and I don't know if Steinberg sells it anymore.

I am under the impression that Steinberg stopped selling this kind of stuff after they were bought by Pinnacle

Maybe you would to try a multiband peak limiter like dB-M multiband limiter. You can run it with winamp 2.xx and the adapt-X plugin. With adapt-X you can run a lot of direct X plugins in winamp.

Now you've said "bowling centre" I would definitely suggest playing around with multi-band compression plug-ins for Winamp, if that's what you're using.

I haven't used any (though for single band compression, I liked Audio Stocker IIRC), but there must be some?!

As you've suggested, you will drive yourself mad by trying to do the whole lot manually using the Winamp EQ!

With the AdaptX plug-in, this opens up the possibility of using some very good DirectX mastering software in real time - but some of it isn't cheap. I've been told that the Ozone plug-ins are good, but I've never used these.

You could buy yourself a hardware MBC like they use in radio, but they're a bit expensive, the best being many thousand pounds/dollars:

http://www.orban.com/

Cheers,
David.

You can try "Octimax winamp plugin" from www.octiv.com

It is not free but there is a possibility to try it out (some kind of shareware).
You can buy it for $49.95