Hello!!

I.m a newbie to this forum wich I was wery glad to find as I'm very intresting
to music and sound on an amateur basis.

For a long time I have been puzzled by a problem when trying to make a
compilation CD from my record collection. My Collection spanns from CD,s
mid 80,s and upp to now and the sound varies a lot. Nowadays when looking
on a sound file it seems (to me) that all new CD's are compressed in one or other way, and listening to two songs from sousces as abow are not very "listnable"
as volume and output differs a lot. I'm mainly listen to music from 60-70's

So my question is, how do I make the sound levels and the Audio"picture" the same?

Will also tell you that many of my records are songs that I can´t find in other place
as they are out of print or newer updated versions of the CD's.

Software that I have is: Diamond Cut Millenium, DartXP, Sound Engine, and Sound Laundry. All of these was inteended for vinyl to CD transfering, and to clean vinyl clicks and pops.

Have tried some compressing tools but áre not shure how to use them.

Sorry for bad English..........


I will be VERY happy for any answers

Rebel

Well, the simplest and the dirtiest way is recording Audio CD with Nero Express. When adding a track, there is checkmark on Nero window that allows normalising all tracks. It will scan the tracks before burning and it will adjust it to sound almost the same.
It works for me when I am making CDs with various music for some party (I don't want to carry originals around), all music on CD sounds the same.
Mind you, I am aware that it is not the best way, but it is one of the ways to do that.

E.B.

Thank's for your input

Well I have that option in my burnersoftware, but still it don't give me the levels I.m looking for....the older CD's sound much weaker that today's. Having approx
1 000 cd's many or the bigger part is different compilations now I'm trying to make my own compilations to remember my younger days and have more listnable compilations and maybe sell out those CD's where just one or two songs is attractive to me, so that is why I want the best possible tools to do it.

There is a very simple reason for the difference you hear. Modern CDs are dynamically compressed, as you correctly noticed. When there is less dynamic range, the CD sounds louder.

To equalise the loudness of your compilations, you need to do one of two things:

1. Compress the dynamic range of the older CD tracks so that they sound as loud as the newer ones.
2. Reduce the level of the newer tracks so they sound as quiet as the older ones.

At first sight, it seems obvious that you sound choose option 1. However, there are two reasons why this may not be a good idea:
a). Figuring out how much compression to apply can be tricky.
b). By compressing the dynamic range, you will squash the life out of the music. If you have two versions of the same track, one compressed and one not, the compressed one will sound louder and initially seem to have more "punch". But if you adjust the playback volume so that the uncompressed one sounds as loud as the compressed one, you will find that the uncompressed one will sound much better.

A possible advantage of using option 1 is that by reducing the quality of the older tracks, you will at least end up with a compilation that sounds consistently bad all the way through!

By choosing option 2, you will retain the quality of the older tracks, but the difference in quality between the old and new tracks would remain. This might be an irritation when listening to the compilation.

There is a program called WaveGain that will try to equalise the loudness of tracks by using simple linear adjustments of level. As a general rule it will bring down the volume of the loud tracks, so it basically implements option 2.

A shareware program that I wrote, called Volume Balancer, attempts the same thing, and offers various options. It uses compression and/or linear volume adjustment depending on the target loudness you select and the existing loudness of each file. I would however caution you that Volume Balancer is a fairly crude tool - it does not offer the fine level of tuning that you can achieve with a sophisticated compressor, such as the one in Adobe Audition.

Welcome to the world of ReplayGain.

There are a few ways that you can do what you want, but two spring to mind.

1. Use WaveGain on the WAV files to attain a consistent track level, and then burn the WAV files to audio CD using any software you like.
2. Use foobar to set ReplayGain tags on any compressed files (e.g.: MP3), and then use foobar or Burrrn to burn to CD. Both apps can respect the ReplayGain info when writing to CD IIRC.

As you are burning CDs using tracks from different albums then it is the track gain that will be relevant to you. With this in mind I must admit my knowledge fails me, and I'm not quite sure exactly how it is better than normalising all tracks. When used in album mode the benefit is easily apparent: that it alters the volume of each track on the album in relation to its peers, so that the album dynamics are not lost simply by maximising the volume of all tracks.

Still, it seems that it is time that you were introduced to the concept of ReplayGain anyway. Hopefully I can get the ball rolling, and someone who actually knows what they are talking about can explain it to both of us.

Edit: too slow again. At least you're in good hands with cliveb.

Edit 2: Looks like i should read the wiki too:

Thank's a lot.......will those program work in bathcmode so I can "normalize" all track togheter before I burn them to CDr?

Yes, e.g.:

WAVEGAIN.EXE --radio --apply *.wav

foobar is a GUI application, but you can apply ReplayGain to multiple files in one go.

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