Can someone suggest a good MP3 normalizer with a link?
I tried downloading MP3 Doctor 5.0.4.e but it won't download.
Thanks

Why do you need to normalize your MP3's?

It is a bad idea for almost any normal use. You might want to look into ReplayGain/MP3Gain instead.

http://www.geocities.com/mp3gain/

why is normalizing mp3s a bad idea?

how is this different then replaygain/mp3gain

Replay Gain doesn't just scan for peaks like normalization does. Check this page to see all the calculations it does. After analyzing each file, Replay Gain changes the volume of the file so that the perceived volume of each file is the same.

Here's why normalizing doesn't work well for the task of making each file sound equally loud.

Does anyone know wether the Sound Check feature in iTunes does normalisation or is based on replaygain?

It reports a +/- dB figure for each track. Can I just compare this with a value generated by a normalisation program and replaygain or is there more to it?

I'm so sorry for digging up an ancient thread, but I could not resist after reading the MP3 Doctor website
That's definitely another way to define volume normalization..

I think thats just dynamic compression and regular normalization. Could be wrong though. You're welcome to download that thing, but based on the site i don't really want to touch it

I just want all my 3000 files fixed so that when I burn a CD to listen to in the car the volumes aren't all different and most of the time they are drastically different. MP3 Doctor appears (according to them and the website) to be better than MP3Gain, because not only does it normalize all the different files, but it preserves/normalizes the volume dynamics within each individual song. But I have no idea which is better, therefore...

Has anyone used both MP3 Doctor and MP3Gain? Noticed which one is better quality? I'm trying to decide which to use. Thanks

Then you want to use some form of Replaygain.



Replaygain does that as well. Have you looked at the replaygain website? All of this is explained there.



I'm not sure what you mean by quality. They're just adjusting volume. There is no quality involved; either it works or it does not. Replaygain does work for what you want. MP3 Doctor may or may not, since we don't know what it does. However, given that they repeatidly say that it normalizes, I would guess that it will probably not work correctly. YMMV.

No idea about that Doctor thing, but mp3gain does exactly what you need.

I'll second that, though my Beatles albums still sound louder to me than the rest of my collection.

Beatles albums are.. special. A lot of it is mono or fake stereo and sounds weird by todays standards I can only guess that confused the algorithm.

Replaygain was a little off for me, too a few times, mostly with older albums that are a little "dull".

For modern rock music with values around -10dB it is spot on though.

I remember one song where it was totally off (at least for my voulme perception, it was a Sisters of Mercy track... "1959" I think) Had to reduce it by another 4 dB manually or it would hurt my ears with headphones.

But dont worry OP, mp3/replaygain is a wonderful gift that will enhance your life considerably.

I'm more a fan of their later material so I don't tracks being in mono is a problem. Perhaps it's because the vocals are mixed louder than just about everything else I listen to?

Okay so mp3doctor is out, but I still have reservations about which is better, replaygain or mp3gain. After reading up on replaygain, it sounds as if it may not work the way I need it to. Replaygain uses tags to fix the volume and mp3gain changes the mp3 data itself. So, obviously if the mp3 data is changed itself, the volume changes will accompany each file no matter what player it is played on (but it's more risky than using tags). My concern is that since replaygain uses tags, the volume changes won't be recognized on say my aftermarket car stereo or my home theater dvd player, in which case, it defeats the purpose. So if I use replaygain to adjust all my mp3s, will my mp3 discs play on my (or any other) car stereo with the proper volume adjustments, or will it only work on certain portable players and stereos? The mp3gain way seems more universal??????????????

MP3gain is one of many programs that implement the Replaygain standard.



Are you burning MP3 CDs, or standard Audio CDs? If the former, you should use Mp3gain. If the latter, you probably want to burn your files with a replaygain aware program. I recommend using foobar2000 since it can replaygain files, and then use tags to burn them. You could also use mp3gain and then burn off of the mp3 files, but that would involve more steps and be slower.

If I have an MP3 recording some speech (like that of a group of people in a meeting) then would normalization would compress the peaks with the result of making it more intelligible?

Hmmm, maybe what I should be asking about is an MP3 audio compression tool? I'm sure many audio purists would never ever use compression on music but maybe on making speech more intelligible they might let me off! :-)

I want it to work universally. In other words I want the mp3 files, or wav files to have the volume correction no matter how they are played. Wired from my computer straight to my stereo receiver (without the iTunes sound check on), or on burned mp3 discs, or on regular wav discs.

When Mp3gain and replaygain will increase or decrease the volume in all the file the normalizer will make some points more or less loudest depending of your adjust.

Normalisation is linear, as far as I know. It merely scales the volume, with no dynamics compression. If you want to do dynamics compression on MP3 files, you're out of luck unless you uncompress to .wav, apply dynamics compression, and recompress to MP3. But nobody here would recommend that, I think.

---

http://www.mp3doctor.com/normalize.htm

<not sarcasm>Oh the horror! Dynamics compression! Transcoding! Resampling!</not sarcasm>

Use MP3Gain. It's lossless, and the resulting files will work on any player. The only limitation is that the volume can only be changed in 1.5dB steps.

To cut off all these confusion, check this HA wiki page. It explains the similarity and difference between MP3Gain and other replaygaining techniques (e.g. foobar2000's).

I like using MP3Gain.
I just wish I could have more control over the amount of adjustment,
instead of everything being adjusted in 1.5db steps.
Like if I had two files, one analyzed @ 90.5 and another @ 92.6,
I could adjust the 90.5 by -1.5 and the 92.6 by -3.6,
thus making both files exactly 89.0.

It can't happen. The global gain adjustment is limited to 8 bits.

But honestly, is 1.5dB really too coarse or are you just looking for perfection?

I seriously doubt that you'll be able to hear the difference considering that it should be no more than 0.75dB.

I guess I'm just looking for perfection.
If a difference of 0.75dB is as close to it as I can get, then I'm happy with that.

A difference 0.75dB should be as far as you can get.

I ABXed about a 5 second sample of some music at normal volume and the volume reduced by 0.75dB. My score was 9/10 but I'm not sure what would happen if I were to ABX an entire song, which is probably what I should be doing considering the idea is to match the perceived levels of tracks, not snippets.

All I can say is try it for yourself. If you aren't satisfied with a resolution of -1.5, adjust your source files with replaygain or wavegain before encoding them to mp3.

Now I have some questions:
Isn't the reference level of replaygain 83dB while mp3gain is 89dB?
If so, why the difference?
Or is it that the default for mp3gain is 89dB but it still puts the difference in the ape tag relative to 83dB?

The real life situation is even harder to ABX: the different levels are associated with different tracks



http://www.mars.org/mailman/public/mad-dev...ary/000993.html

Not quite, for example:

Target: 89 dB

Track A: 91.2 dB -> possible corrections -1.5 dB (89.7 db) and -3 dB (88.2 dB) -> -1.5 dB is closer -> 89.7 dB

Track B: 89.8 dB -> possible correction -1.5 dB (88.3 db) -> -1.5 dB is closer than uncorrected -> 88.3 dB

Difference: 89.7 - 88.3 dB = 1.4 dB

0.75dB is still as far as you can deviate from the reference that papadoc wanted to exactly match.

Thanks for the link Patsoe; and you are absolutely right: it should be more difficult to notice a difference between the level of different tracks even if the difference is 1.49dB.

I can understand people who want to normalize. What good is replaygain when regular players like Winamp won't use it anyway? Average Joe does not want to be bothered with installing a plugin for Winamp to read it...

If you use MP3gain on MP3 files, then even though WinAmp's default MP3 plugin don't do replaygaining, the audio itself has been reversibly replaygained by modifying the "global gain". That's the benefit of MP3Gain versus ReplayGain a la foobar2000.

But WinAmp's Ogg Vorbis input plugin do support replaygaining. So, all is not lost.

Any downsides to using mp3gain over foobar gain for mp3 files?

I can't believe you haven't summarized the thread yet

Main drawback: Limited resolution (i.e. 1.5 dB steps).

Another drawback: You must choose between Album or Track mp3gaining before processing the files. Cannot have them both.

Potential drawback: If a stupid program botches the file's tags, the mp3gain becomes irreversible.

I use both systems.

First I run MP3Gain in album mode.

Album gain adjustment in MP3Gain makes different albums to have a more even overall volume level and usually prevents the files from clipping on decoding stage. Sometimes I adjust the reference level a bit if the album clips with the default value. 89 dB can be a too high reference level for highly dynamic music like classical symphonies.

I have found that normally the album gain mode is better also with a portable or car mp3 player because it keeps the quieter tracks as the artist has meant them to be. I don't want to make a quiet ballad to be as loud as a loud rock track.

Because the APE tags are problematic with some programs I have disabled the "undo" tag writing in MP3Gain. I have never had a reason to revert the files because album gain preserves the track volume level differences inside each album. (I have set MP3Gain to log the changes, but the huge log file seems to be completely redundant for me.)

Afterwards I scan the files again with foobar. Foobar calculates new replay gain values that are based on the adjusted files. This makes possible to use foobar's precise playback adjustments and occasionally switch to track gain mode on PC playback.

I just tested out a few songs with MP3gain before running my whole 3000 songs through it. It showed all my songs to be very off, yet when I had them all converted in track mode and burned onto a cd I wasn't very impressed and even compared it to a before mp3gain cd with the same songs. It didn't seem to correct volume differences all that much, and I think even made some of the tracks sound worse in terms of quality. I'm not sure if the volume differences are because of the quality differences, since on the cd I burned I had songs with bitrates ranging from 128 to 360. Yet some of the low bit rate songs sounded pretty good and some of the higer bitrate songs didn't sound so great. It's kind of depressing. I wish there was a way to make all my mp3s sound better. I don't have the time or money to redo my whole collection. Hardly any of them were ripped, they were all downloaded. I spend tons of money on high quality car stereo and home stereo equipment just to have my mp3s sound crappier than the standard radio stations.

If the songs are not as loud as they used to be, turn up the volume; low volume can give an impression of bad quality.

I'd like to weigh in here. I use a program called 'MP3TrimPro' to normalize volume levels on MP3's. I highly recommend it because I have show it to be a conservative modification. For instance, if I adjust volume up 3 db, then back down 3 db, I get a byte for byte duplicate of the original. Or if I adjust up by 4.5, then up by 1.5, that file is a duplicate of a file that was taken from the original and raised 6 db all in one step. Thus, it is lossless. It can be used in batch mode.

There is also a program called WAVTrimPro, which also claims to normalize volume. However, my tests show that it is lossy. No doubt it requantizes, and that is why. It's like changing the resolution on a digital picture, there is resampling and rounding errors. By the way, please turn off any normalization any of you are using within EAC. That is a WAV normalization, which as I just mentioned is lossy. I showed that directly for the case of EAC as well. Once EAC has normalized the WAV, there appears to be no getting the original back. So don't let EAC do it, use MP3Gain or MP3TrimPro instead.

I think MP3TrimPro and that MP3Gain program people are talking about work about the same way. I think there is some kind of gain/volume control field in an MP3 that can be adjusted without affecting the rest of the MP3.

I highly, HIGHLY don't recommend any 'normalizers' that compress dynamic range. That's just ruining the music, darn rudely.


@Scarface7810: Then again maybe MP3Gain isn't so great, I don't know I've never used it. But you definitely want to check out a program called EncSpot (http://www.guerillasoft.co.uk/encspot/). It goes through your directory of MP3's and identifies the encoder used on each, and rates their quality. It even shows details on what Lame options were used, if applicable. If you have a lot of MP3's that show up red in the display window, you may want to focus on downloading higher quality versions of those MP3's. In particular, watch for Xing recordings to eliminate, try to replace with Lame encoded versions.

Seeing that the volume adjusts in 1.5 dB steps, I'd bet my balls they do it identically.

For a technical description of how MP3Gain works (and why the 1.5 dB steps), see this page on HA Wiki.

Although I agree the 1.5dB steppings strongly suggest that, I would still advise against betting your balls on anything.

Hey, I got lots of balls lying around my home... billiard balls, bowling balls, soccer balls, beachballs...

I just wanted to point out that since foobar2000 0.9, you can scan files for their replaygain values as normal, but you can also apply the replaygain value directly to the MP3 data (like MP3Gain).

So if you use foobar, MP3Gain is now redundant.

Aside: My method is to apply replaygain values directly to the MP3 data (either using MP3Gain or foobar), then scan the files again so they have the replaygain tag. This saves me reaching for the volume control on my MP3 player, and when playing in a replaygain-aware player I can use track-gain if I'm shuffling playlists.