Tool for Mp3 balance?

[cobraab]

I am looking for professional tool for balancing Mp3 files before i burn them , i need someting efficent better that nero . also that work under Xp.

[Fox Mulder]

What do you mean by balancing?

If you want the same volume, then "MP3Gain" analyzes mp3 files to determine how loud they sound to the human ear. It can then adjust the mp3 files so that they all have the same loudness without any quality loss. This way, you don't have to keep reaching for the volume dial on your mp3 player every time it switches to a new song.

[VIPER_1069]

if they are of different bitrate then they will be louder or quieter on burn to audio there is not a great deal you can do about this apart from convert them all to the lowest bitrate mp3 you have to get them on the same level unfortunatly this does not work the other way as you cannot put back what has already been removed to make a smaller bitrate mp3 so maby you either have to live with it or try somethin else !? rule of the thumb with mp3 is try to get them all the same bitrate and 128bit is usually the norm for acceptable results less than this sounds bad audiophiles like 200+ but to most people its not really noticable at 128 bit its personal preference

[Fox Mulder]

AFAIK bitrate has nothing to do with perceived loudness, and reencoding degrades the quality too much IMHO.

MP3Gain operates in two modes, Radio and Album.
Radio mode allows a mix of unrelated songs to be volume-corrected to a selected level. MP3Gain calculates the volume level for each song individually. It then corrects each song to make its volume level match the Target Volume. For example, if you have 3 songs that have volume levels of 86, 91 and 89 dB and you use Radio Gain to convert them to the Target Volume of 98 dB, they will all be at approximately 98 dB.
Album mode allows a selection of related songs (as they would appear on an album) to be volume-corrected relative to each other. MP3Gain first calculates the album volume level by finding the volume level of each song and then calculating a volume level for the entire album. It then finds the ratio between the album volume level and the Target Volume. It then corrects the volume for each song based on the ratio. For example, if you have 3 songs that have volume levels of 86, 91 and 89 dB and an album volume level of 90 and you use Album Gain to convert them to the Target Volume of 98 dB, then the 3 songs will be corrected to 93.6, 99 and 96.9 dB respectively:

Album volume level 90 / Target Volume 98 = 1.088888

Song #1 volume level 86 dB * 1.088888 = 93.6 dB

Song #2 volume level 91 dB * 1.088888 = 99.0 dB

Song #3 volume level 89 dB * 1.088888 = 96.9 dB

With Album mode, you want some songs to be noticeably quieter than other songs, just like they are on an album. If you're playing a classical CD, you expect the track with the flute solo to be quieter than the track with the big full-orchestra finale. Album mode allows you to correct an entire album while keeping each song's volume level relative to the other songs.

Peak Normalization

Most programs that “normalize” sound files do so by adjusting all the samples so that the loudest single sample is at some specified value. This is not a good way to make all the files actually have the same loudness. First of all, the human ear does not hear the loudness of single samples. It averages out sounds over time. Secondly, today's popular music CDs are heavily compressed. The sound engineers making the CD raise the average level so that it sounds much louder, while compressing the loudest parts so that they don't distort.Both of these files have a peak sample at about 100%, but the compressed file has a much louder average level. It sounds much louder when played back. So to do actual loudness normalization instead of peak normalization, we need to calculate how loud the file actually sounds. MP3Gain uses the Replay Gain algorithm to calculate this loudness.

Lossless Gain Adjustment

The bad news: MP3Gain can only adjust the volume of your mp3 files in steps of 1.5 dB.
The good news: 1.5 dB is a small enough step for most practical purposes. Most humans can just barely hear a volume change of 1 dB.
The other good news is that this volume adjustment is completely lossless. In other words, if you adjust an mp3 by -6 dB and then change your mind, you can adjust it again by +6 dB and it will be exactly the same as it was before you made the first adjustment.
Here's the technical reason why it's lossless, and also why the smallest change possible is 1.5 dB:
The mp3 format stores the sound information in small chunks called “frames”. Each frame represents a fraction of a second of sound. In each frame there is a “global gain” field. This field is an 8-bit integer (so its value can be a whole number from 0 to 255).
When an mp3 player decodes the sound in the frame, it uses the global gain field to multiply the decoded sound samples by 2 ^ (gain / 4).
So if you add 1 to this gain field in all the frames in the mp3, you effectively multiply the amplitude of the whole file by 2 ^ (1/4) = 119% = +1.5 dB.
Likewise, if you subtract 1 from the global gain, you multiply the amplitude by 2 ^ (-1/4) = 84% = -1.5 dB.

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

http://www.replaygain.org/

[lore]

AFAIK bitrate has nothing to do with perceived loudness, and reencoding degrades the quality too much IMHO

Yep

[malbolgia]

nice post fox

[gfly3]

any suggestions where i can get mp3gain? for some reason i cannot download from the site or any of the mirror sites?

[gfly3]

i even did a google search and every link i tried said it could'nt be found. seems to have disappeared from the web .

[mikron]

whats the latest build of mp3 gain ? i have 096

[ponzan]

you can get Sound Forge 6 searching this forum and do all this and much much more with almost any kind of sound file
(it comes with a very advanced normalizing tool and tons of other pro tools, filters, etc. in just one bundle)

check here: http://forum.cdrsoft.cc/showthread.p...threadid=20002


anyway MP3Gain sounds very impressing as Fox explains it, I would like to try it and yes, it does seems v.096 10 October 2001 was the last release but has dissapeared from every link

would you mikron upload to us?

[gfly3]

yes someone please upload to us

[gfly3]

i scraped up v0.9.0 from the web. if you would like and its within forum rules i could upload it, but it is not the latest version.

[gfly3]

the full install is available at the website again . the normal install is not..
h**p://ww*.geocities.com/mp3gain/ enjoy..

[ponzan]

tnx gfly3

[gfly3]

no prob ponzan , let us know what you think of it after you try it out.
my first impression is good, i like the simplicity and it seems to do a pretty good job .