Do you level your audio?

what do you mean 'level'? are you referring to artificial software playback gain adjustment? If so the answer is no. I listen to entire albums even on my ipod. I adjust the volume when the album starts to a comfortable listening level, and that's good enough for me.

I haven't, but I'm thinking about it (at least on my portable).  From what I understand, it's possible to apply replaygain on a per-album basis, so you preserve any intentional volume changes/dynamics between tracks within an album.

yes, ReplayGain with fb2k (main reason: to prevent clipping and to reduce the gap between extremely compressed and very soft recordings), if that's what you mean

For my home library I've always just constantly adjusted analog volume so it is still bit-perfect.  My iPhone is my portable player and I don't think it even supports any kind of replaygain.

I use foobar ReplayGain with the new EBU R128 component, it calculates the gain better than the original ReplayGain algorithm.

Apple has soundcheck and foobar can convert replaygain value to soundcheck.

For portable use only.  I'll use MP3Gain to level all my files to about 91db.  Nothing worse than a loud track and then a quiet track while driving and then you fumble as you're blasted by a loud song again.

I use MP3Gain (album gain) and level the songs between 89-90db. The reason is the same as for everyone else here...

I apply (so i mod the file) the replaygain only on my cowon, i set a volume and it's universal for all songs.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr Pink57 

I did not mention but I use Media Monkey's audio leveling option when I convert from FLAC to Vorbis.

Ditto

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr Pink57 

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChipnDalebowl 

For portable use only.  I'll use MP3Gain to level all my files to about 91db.  Nothing worse than a loud track and then a quiet track while driving and then you fumble as you're blasted by a loud song again.

This is what I was getting at for leveling my audio, I hate when this happens and it really screws with my hearing if it does in fact happen.  I do not listen to just one album at a time, sometimes, but rarely just random the whole player.

 

I did not mention but I use Media Monkey's audio leveling option when I convert from FLAC to Vorbis.

I have Mediamonkey set to MP3Gain my tracks to 89db on-the-fly when it loads my Cowon player only. My rockboxed Sansas support ReplayGain, and my Touch I use Soundcheck.

I'm curious, do you make the average loudness on every track 89 dB?  For instance, if one track is already 89 dB and the next track is 70dB, do you bring the 2nd one up to the loudness of the first?  If so, it seem to me that you're killing the dynamics.  Or are you doing it for an album as a whole?  I tried soundcheck or what ever it's called on the iPod for a little while but got very frustrated with it.  It applied the gain on a track by track basis which was really annoying on albums that are continues music with arbitrary tracking.

Quote:

Originally Posted by scompton 

I'm curious, do you make the average loudness on every track 89 dB?  For instance, if one track is already 89 dB and the next track is 70dB, do you bring the 2nd one up to the loudness of the first?  If so, it seem to me that you're killing the dynamics.  Or are you doing it for an album as a whole?  I tried soundcheck or what ever it's called on the iPod for a little while but got very frustrated with it.  It applied the gain on a track by track basis which was really annoying on albums that are continues music with arbitrary tracking.

Well, with an iPod, I believe that simply disabling soundcheck on the device itself if you were listening to entire albums would suit your needs. For my rockboxed players, I do replaygain scans of both albums and individual tracks, and have RG set to "track mode only when shuffling". My Cowon player, I always shuffle all, so it's beneficial to have them all roughly the same volume.

I wouldn't think of ruining a work of art by doing something like that.  It seems to remove the feeling and emotion of the song if you limit it's dynamic range in such away.  Fiddling with the volume if you set it too high at first is a minor annoyance.