I don't know much about normalizing software for WAV files, but I do know that they can really screw up the sound of my WAV files, after I take so much care to preserve their quality. So I'd like to know of a program that will do normalization on a group of WAV's, so that there aren't any files in the group that sound much louder or softer than another, without destroying the musical integrity of the files. Some of those I've tried, like the advanced normalizing of Audiograbber, worked well at keeping an average volume, but sucked the life out of the music. Others like Nero don't affect the quality of the sound so much, but don't work that well at maintaing an average volume. What will do both rather well?

do a search for WaveGain here. that's the programm you most likly want to use.
it's hosted on rarewares: http://rarewares.hydrogenaudio.org/others.html

this also might be of some interest: http://www.replaygain.org/


you can aslo aply gain totally lossles (though you prob. won't notice a differnece with wavegain) with MP3Gain: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mp3gain/

wavgain/replaygain is what you are looking for, as said above
I have never touched my volume knob since I found out about it

I'm having problems finding enough info on setting up replaygain, and just how it works.

1. Is it possible to process an entire collection of MP3s to standardize the playback volume with replaygain like 'sound leveling' in the new versions of MusicMatch?

2. Is there MP3 playback software that utilizes replaygain's coding?

What all needs to be set up to encode MP3s with replaygain and play them back?

Shel

download mp3gain and process your whole mp3 directory (read the documentation first about album mode/singe track mode)
no player software support is needed for that approach, it works on the mp3 directly without quality loss.

2. foobar2000 can replaygain scan also, without manipulating the mp3s directly. It writes tags instead. But then you will only have replaygained playback when using foobar as player

If you want to adjust the files themselves (and change them in all apps) use mp3gain.

Foobar2000 uses a more elegant approach which is to store the info in ID3v2/APEv2 tags and then adjust them at playback. It also supports replaygain in all formats which is nice if you're like me and use a collection of MP3, AAC, MPC, ogg and lossless.

Ah yes... I have been using mp3gain to process mixes of audio files before burning them to a disk. Nice little utility. But I was hoping to find something that might be able to do something like MusicMatch's 'sound leveling' that could process all my files by modifying tags, leaving the files to play normally when played back in other hardware or sofware players.


Yeah... that's what I'm looking for. What's involved with the process of adjusting them at playback? With MM, I did a 'Select All', and selected 'Sound Leveling' from the popup menu that wrote something to the file tags. Is there a similar process of some kind in FooBar2000 for setting normalization at playback?


It looks like replaygain is already installed and configured in the copy of FooBar2000 v0.7 I've installed. So I guess I'm already set up for other file formats.

My only problem at this point is my problem trying to get the PI 166MHz Toshiba Libretto I use as a portable MP3 player to deal with >any< DSP components except volume. I don't see replaygain on the DSP component list, so maybe that's not an issue.

Actually, equalization is the most important DSP component I'd really like to get working. I've updated the ASPI and sound drivers on the Libretto to improve performance, disbabled everything from loading at boot except explorer and systray in W98, but files still stutter a bit with equalization configured.

Shel