Normalising my mp3 albums

[korbitz]

Okay, my cab is getting to the stage that i want to put some music into it, at present i have 800+ albums in mp3 format.

The problem is that i got them from various sources  and when i have the jukebox software on random, some songs are real quiet whilst others are loud. The question: is there any software out there that can normalise all my mp3s to the same volumn level, i did a search on google but tbh i'm not 100% sure what i'm looking for, all the software i found allows you to increase/decrease volumn per album but not across all my albums. Maunally doing each album is an option but i would prefer an automatic approach.

[drventure]

http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/

Best for batch normalizing. And free.

[korbitz]

Many thanks, thats what i was looking for 

[richms]

replaygain is what you want, but it seems to be sadly lacking in all the jukebox software I have tried till now - mp3 gain is fine if all you have is mp3s and are happy to have a change that doesnt differentiate between album and track based playback, but if you have other formats too, then its not going to get you very far.

Also normalizing etc will do nothing to help with the difference between songs with dynamics (old stuff) and songs without any (new stuff) since they all work on pretty much the loudest part of the song.

[FrizzleFried]

Thanks for the link... I normalized my 8700 songs in about 6 hours or so.  It did seem to help quite a bit (though not 100% perfect,  but waddaya want?)

[drventure]

RichMS is right about the normalizing and the file formats.

MP3Gain is far from perfect, but it'd the best and easiest I've found so far for MP3s. If the source material isn't compressed (as in signal compression, not as in ZIP), then yes, the normalization won't be as effective.

At least it's non-destructive (ie you can undo it back without messing up your mp3)

[Barry Barcrest]

The best way is to do it with hardware but you can't do that on the cheap.

[AussieJuke]

Do 3rd party software compressors exist that you can "plug in" to the Windows audio signal chain?

[panama1974]

      FFDShow DECODER levels in real time in videos and mp3 extension mpeg, avi, divx, just configure ke know, in most jukebox software works very well.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow/

[richms]

Actually software is better since it can have a lookahead to avoid sudden changes to the amount of gain.

If you want some compression/limiting look into the creative soundcards and their software - the stuff that was allegedly making mp3's sound better seemed to just be an agressive multiband limiter which made it sound very much like FM stations.