Establish Consistent Volume Levels on MP3 Recordings

Alden Speirs · Post by **Alden Speirs** » 24 Apr 2009 12:55 am

I have found a very good software program for adjusting volume levels to a consistent value on MP3 files to be "MP3 Gain". It is a free program available at

http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net

This program eliminates clipping and when you burn a cd the levels are the same for all tracks. It will do a quantity of files at one time, and you save the leveled value to the file.

EXCELLENT PROGRAM! (At least I think so)

Alden Speirs

Chip Fossa · Post by **Chip Fossa** » 24 Apr 2009 11:37 am

Alden,

SourceForge are the folks responsible for the open shareware Audacity. It makes sense they would make MP3Gain.

I have Nero as my primary CD burner, which includes 'normalize volume for all CD files'. Another feature in Nero is 'burn with no space between files'.

I like that one. One song right after another. About one second of lull - that's it.

Chip Fossa · Post by **Chip Fossa** » 24 Apr 2009 11:40 am

Alden,

SourceForge are the folks responsible for the open shareware Audacity. It makes sense they would make MP3Gain.

I have Nero as my primary CD burner, which includes 'normalize volume for all CD files'. Another feature in Nero is 'burn with no space between files'.

I like that one. One song right after another. About one second of lull - that's it.

Robert Tripp · Post by **Robert Tripp** » 27 Apr 2009 8:54 pm

I also use Nero for those same reasons, plus some of the other options like stereo widening etc.

Chip Fossa · Post by **Chip Fossa** » 28 Apr 2009 7:27 am

Robert,

Could you expound a bit more on stereo widening?

I'm not sure if I've run across that option, but it sounds like a good enhancement.

Richard Sinkler · Post by **Richard Sinkler** » 28 Apr 2009 2:11 pm

I used this recently to do my folder of like 800 songs. Some I had were recorded way too low, almost half the volume of the others. It did bring the volume up to the level of the others but the sound was so distorted, they were unintelligible. Good thing I copied the 800 songs to another folder and tried it on those so my originals are still good. It works real good if the volume levels are reasonably close to each other already.

I did not use it to level out songs for CD burning. I use these songs on my MP3 player, and the differences in volume sometimes is a problem like if I am using my Mp3 player as break music at a gig, or in my car stereo, where the difference could blow out my speakers if I raise the low songs to a listenable level and forget to turn the stereo back down after the song.

Alden Speirs · Post by **Alden Speirs** » 5 May 2009 11:09 pm

Richard,
The problems I was having was that the files were recorded too loud, very often with clipping and distortion. This program eliminated these problems for me. You are correct in saving all files when doing any modifications in case of something going wrong. I have had no experience with too low of recordings as you described and appreciate the warning of not using mp3 gain to try and improve.

Robert Tripp · Post by **Robert Tripp** » 6 May 2009 7:22 am

Chip...

There are filter options available for things like stereo widening. The normalize function is just one of them that has a checkbox at the start of the process.

Once you have added a track to be burned, right click on the track and go to properties, open the filter tab, and play with your options. You can even set the RMS level of normailization that you want on that track.

Good Luck

Chip Fossa · Post by **Chip Fossa** » 6 May 2009 10:41 am

Thanks Robert,

I'll definitely give it a shot.

Richard Sinkler · Post by **Richard Sinkler** » 7 May 2009 4:05 pm

The songs I had problems with were songs that I had to take off a DVD using my DVD player into a stand alone CD recorder in my stereo (my crappy Dell computer won't play a DVD - with XP Media Center - Go figger). Then I had to rip the files onto my computer. Somewhere the volume level got screwed up although the level meters at every step off the process where high, right below the red section.

I'll re-do those (or just delete them), but it did work great on the rest of the songs.

Mitch Drumm · Post by **Mitch Drumm** » 10 May 2009 2:24 pm

I have used mp3 gain for about 5 years, with no complaints.

It is lossless and does not encode or decode the file. I think it just sets some info within the file's tag regarding proper playback volume. That info is then communicated to your playback software when listening.

Here is a good tutorial:

http://tinyurl.com/pzwwg5

The tutorial explains how to get rid of clipping.

It sets the volume to within .5 db of your chosen level. The default level is 89.0 db, so any given song may be set at 88.5 db, 89.0 db, or 89.5 db. It can't control in anything finer than .5 db increments, but that is plenty good enough for human hearing.

I left the default at 89.0. The result is that I cannot get quite enough volume out of my playback system for those times when I want to listen at high volumes. So I may go back and move the chosen level to maybe 94.0. Whether you would need to do that depends on the gain characteristics of your playback system.

In my experience, probably 98% of mp3 files that I run across must be reduced in volume, rather than boosted.

Chip Fossa · Post by **Chip Fossa** » 10 May 2009 6:24 pm

This thread is getting better all the time.

Robert, I've been messing with 'stereo widening' in Nero, and I'm getting to like it a lot.

Problem is though, when I have 30-32 songs lined up in Nero to burn, I have to go through every single song to check off the 'stereo widening' feature.

I've been looking around in Nero for some way to 'stereo widen' all 30 or so songs in one fell swoop. Haven't found anything yet. Sure would save a lot of time.

Maybe you know where the magic wand is located to make this happen?

Thanks for your help, and anyone else's, as well.

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Establish Consistent Volume Levels on MP3 Recordings

Establish Consistent Volume Levels on MP3 Recordings

Mp3 Gain Program