I've recently put together a few collections of my own and whilst I've tried to use the same bitrate for each one, they have different volume levels.

I know about normalising when converting to audio, but is it possible to normalise whilst burning multiple tracks to a CD in ISO format ?

Any help appreciated as always.

try musicmatch now suports volume leveling as it burns
email me (johndmac@hotmail.com)

so does the latest versions of nero.

colin. :clown:

Originally posted by chandler68
so does the latest versions of nero.

colin. :clown:

I believe Nero only normalizes when burning to an Audio CD not to an ISO data CD. MusicMatch's Volume Leveling works by entering a Replay Gain (http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~djmrob/replaygain/index.html) parameter in the MP3 tag.

MP3Gain (http://www.geocities.com/mp3gain/) uses a similar technique, although it is a stand-alone utility. It's advantage similar to that of MusicMatch's Volume Leveling is it doesn't actually resample the MP3, it simply rewrites it with a Global Gain parameter written to each frame. It's advantage over Replay Gain is that all players/burners use the Global Gain parameter but MusicMatch is the only player I know of that uses the Replay Gain parameter.

Thanks for the replies. Just a further question.

Presumably, normalising works by taking an average or mean volume level from a number of tracks. In other words if you are burning an audio CD with 12 tracks, it will work out some kind of average level and either increase or decrease the volume accordingly.

If, as you're saying MP3Gain etc can tag each track individually, what does it use as its baseline ? Is there a setting in which you say, 'I want all my MP3's to be set at a certain level' ?

When all said and done, I'm not over keen on normalising as it's not an intelligent program as such and some tracks are, and should be, quieter than others !

You are correct that normalizers are not intelligent, although MP3Gain uses advanced statistical techniques to make it's adjustments. The advantage to MP3Gain is that it's normalization is lossless and can therefore be undone (as well as the fact that it doesn't resample the song). But it's intellignce is used to determine what the actual peak levels are so that a click or pop is not used to set the volume level.

Normalizers should apply the same setting to all songs that will be burned to a single CD. Some normalizers offer the option to raise average levels to a certain level which would not take into consideration the difference in the dynamics of individual songs. However, the most common method is to use peak normalizations, which will raise all songs peak volumes to the same level and all other levels in the song by the same amount.

This will have the same effect as you simply turning up the volume control so that the loudest passages all match. With peak normalizers you typically set the % of maximum volume that the songs peak volume reaches (usually a % between 95 and 99% is used). As long as this % is not over 100% the song will not reach 0dB and clip. Furthermore the dynamics within the song will not be altered and it will in most cases make the transistions between songs have a more consistant volume. Songs that have a lower average volume level will maintain a lower average volume level but the overall level will be adjusted based on the peak.

If you are burning all songs from the same album, normalization should not be nessesary anyway, since the engineer and producer already optimized the volume levels. For each individual song as well as for the mix of songs on the album.

Great Info guys, I was wondering the same thing. Does anyone know if Roxio 5 does "normailzing". I have been burning CD's for over a year now and still haven;t hit the "perfect" sound levels. Oh well, live and learn. Thanks in advance.

:rolleyes: :beer:

Yup, use SoundStream. It's under Effects.