Hi everyone. I am new on this site and have read about using wavegain to normalize tracks that I have compiled from several cd's to be burned onto a cd-R.

Once I compiled the songs I wanted, I used wavegain to normalize the different tracks. Now before I burned the cd, I wanted to listen to them, so I moved them into my itunes to listen to them. Now I had the songs in my itunes but in mp3 format and I happened to compare the volume of the songs, by comparing the mp3 format and then the one that I had applied wavegain.

Now the problem is this: the volume of the wavegain track is much lower than the volume of the mp3 track. The mp3 track was a track that was in wave that I had converted to mp3 using foobar. I then made copies of the original wave files and applied wavegain to them. Now can you tell me why the volume of the wavegain tracks is much lower and how I might be able to fix this. thanks very much.

Guppy

This is intentional. Wavegain is no 'standard' normalization, wavegain tries to make every track sound equally loud through analyzing the average loudness of your tracks and setting this to a fixed level (89dB). In most cases this will reduce the volume of your music, especially with modern music. See Replay Gain for further information.
Most people here are convinced that replaygain (and wavegain of course) are superior to normalizing.

Exactly so.

If you want to 'equalise' the volume of the mp3 tracks to that of the wavegained tracks, you could use mp3gain. Does the same thing except on mp3s.

Thanks soulsearchingsun for your help. I do like wavegain and maybe I will do a little more research in replaygain to see if there is any way that I can increase the volume level during the application of it. If you know of a way, anything that you could suggest would be appreciated. Thanks again.

Guppy



Thanks john33. I appreciate your help. I do like the volume level of the mp3 tracks, and as I mentioned to soulsearchingsun, if there is any way that I can increase the volume level before applying the wavegain to my tracks, I would like to know. I am going to do a little more researching, however, if you can suggest anything, that would be appreciated also.

Thanks again,

Guppy

You can adjust the reference level to something higher then 89dB.

http://replaygain.hydrogenaudio.org/faq_quiet.html

Cheers,
David.

Thanks Mike. I will try that. Can you tell me what dB level might be good and which level I should not go over, or does it depend on the type of music that I am working with. Thanks again for your help.

Guppy




Thanks David for this information.

I just have one other quick question. Will using wavegain (or mp3gain) affect the quality of my tracks at all, or does it just adjust the volume level in order that the various tracks from different cd's sound the same level?

Thanks everyone.

Guppy