[Pendergast]

Hello,

I have encoded all my music in the highest possible format in iTunes. Thaty being debatable, the actual reason of my posting this thread is that I found out that playing the CD straight from the cd-rom drive of my powerbook 12 (1GHz) and playing the files I imported from that CD to my hard drive through the same iTunes software lead to a big difference in volume.

The sound from the CD is louder than the one of the encoded files.

This changes my project of using a hard drive as a source of all my music, and getting rid of the CDs that take a lot of room at my place.

Is there anyway to bring up the volume of the files encoded higher without changing the sound quality? I thought I would be able to reproduce the music files from the CD into exact copies (.mp4, AAC encoder, 320 kpbs, 48.000kHz, optimized for Velocity Engine).

Any comments, or suggestions in this regard?

 

[pedxing]

I am not sure what tools people use on the Mac, but if you want to absolutely keep the same sound quality, you will have to encode your music into a lossless compressed format such as FLAC or APE. ITunes should also have the option for lossless compression, using Apple's special media format. This should be practically-bit to bit the same as the CD, just compressed. If the file is decompressed back to, let say a wav file, then it should be exactly the same on the CD (although this is debateable depending on the hardware and ripping software, but lets not go there). However, the amount of drive space it takes up may not be reasonable.

I am not familiar with Mac OS X, so what I am saying may not apply to you. Differences in volume should be a the only way of determining the quality of the encoding. CDs played straight from the CD player might be going through a different audio path through the computer and the CD player might have its own volume adjustment. In addition to this possbility, some ripping utilities and encoding utlities may use something like "replaygain" to normailze the sound so clipping does not happen and all tracks have the same relative amount of loudness.

 

[Rempert]

If you want to reproduce the CD exactly, you should use ALAC instead of AAC (not sure if you have enough hard drive space to do this though), and 44.1 khz instead of 48khz.

...I'm not sure what is going on to cause your compressed files to be a significantly different volume from the original CD, but this should not be the case! I don't have an Apple or using iTunes though, so I'm afraid I won't be much help on this one.

 

[Pendergast]

Man, I am sooo dumb.

I forgot to check out the "Sound Check" from iTunes preferences...

Thank you all anyway!