[Jeffie]

Before loading up my DAP, I've always ran some sort of
audio volume limiting program against the files.

At one time I ran normalize (From Dr. tag) and now "Match"
(from goldwave) to get the audio volumes close enough that
I'm not adjusting volumes between songs when allowing the player to randomly play files.

My question is, is this overkill? Does anyone else do that, or just load the songs directly, and deal with it? Or am I overly sensitive to the volume
differences between songs from different albums/groups, etc?

 

[Febs]

What type of codec are you using for songs on your DAP? If you are going through this procedure with MP3s and Goldwave, you are degrading the quality of your music, because you are decoding the songs, editing them in Goldwave, and then re-encoding them.

If you're using MP3, Google for a program called mp3gain. This will accomplish the same thing in a non-destructive manner.

If your player supports it, you could also use replaygain.

Both mp3gain and replaygain accomplish the same thing. Replaygain works by storing information in the tags of your files, while mp3gain works by actually adjusting the volume of each frame of the mp3 file. As a result, replaygain will work only with players that recognize the replaygain tag information, while mp3gain will work on any player.

 

[Jeffie]

I tried using mp3gain before, and never found it to work as well
as match under goldwave.

 

[Mr.PD]

I use mpTrim. It doesn't seem to degrade my mp3s. I have the free version and my only complaint is that it won't work on longer songs (I think 6 minutes is the max length). I will have to purchase the program to do longer songs and batch processing.