Question about normalizing volume on iPod

[Perky McGiggles]

I'm not sure if this is the exact forum but it's iPod related.

Okay, so a lot of my music collection has varying volumes. Some songs are quiet, others are loud. This is really annoying for listening on road trips because you have to adjust volume for each song it seems.

My question is there a way to make all the songs on my iPod the same volume, but without raising the quiet parts of song to the same level. So like some of my classical songs with quiet instrumentals would still be quiet, just the song as a whole would match the volume of every other song.

I've heard of MP3Gain but I don't know what volume to adjust music too. For example 89db is too quiet, I don't know what volume music is SUPPOSE to be at.

Any help with this matter would be greatly appreciated!

 

[pata2001]

If 89db on MP3gain is too quiet, then increase the volume during playback.

You can adjust the level you want. Personally I use 91db.

iTunes + iPods have a feature called soundcheck that you can enable. It does a similar thing.

 

[Perky McGiggles]

Do you know what db a song is suppose to be at normally?

 

[DarkScythe]

I'm not quite sure how the value was derived, but I believe the discussion was held over at hydrogenAudio, according to my friend. Anyway, for normalizing volume, everyone I know uses replaygain, and that scans files and normalizes them to 89dB as well.
As far as I know it won't try to raise/lower every single part of your song to 89dB, as that will make it sound flat. It scans the file for its peak and adjusts accordingly, I believe. For foobar at least, it also allows you to scan a set as an album rather than individual tracks, so individual "loud" tracks will still be relatively loud after everything has been normalized.

 

[Perky McGiggles]

I guess the problem with 89db is it is noticeably lower in volume than the any other music file you come across. I use to use 89db for my iPod but it got to be too much to adjust each new song I got.

 

[DarkScythe]

If the volumes of the tracks are inconsistent, then I'd wager that something is not working properly.
I have a bunch of albums tagged with replaygain info and a bunch without it, and there is a clear difference between them (I'm doing this in foobar.)

I'm not sure if replaygain information is adhered to by an iPod though. I don't think it is, but I could be wrong. My friend recently got an iPod and he complained about it. What he ended up doing (since he didn't want to use the iPod's soundcheck function) was transcode his FLACs to WAV or AAC (I forget) using foobar and having some RG or volume limiter DSP active.. or something. I don't quite remember how he did it, but he did acheive consistent volume on his iPod.

 

[SawaFish]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Perky McGiggles /img/forum/go_quote.gif I guess the problem with 89db is it is noticeably lower in volume than the any other music file you come across. I use to use 89db for my iPod but it got to be too much to adjust each new song I got.

I just used MP3Gain to adjust the volume of all my tracks to 89db but noticed allmost all already were averaged around 103db with some much higher or lower. Just download some albums and see what their average db is with MP3Gain (just analyse) and then set your desired standard volume to that number instead of the 89db MP3Gain has as default.
That way you shouldn't have too much problems with varying volume and you'd only have to use MP3Gain once a month or so to readjust all new music of that month instead of every time you download something.

Also, I believe iTunes and Foobar can do this automatically for you.

 

[antiman]

but i have thousands of albums... do you have to set this control for every album? or can you tell itunes to do it to everyone as needed?

 

[mojo]

If you use iTunes, then you need to use the "Sound Check" feature. I don't use iTunes myself but I think you can get it to check all your music automatically, and sync that data with the iPod.

I prefer to use WinAMP and MP3Gain. If you have your music directory set up so that it has lots of sub-directories, each with one album in it then you can just open the music directory in MP3Gain and it will find all your music. Better yet, if you then select all files and calculate album gain, it will group files by album automatically. It will take ages but you only have to do it once, and then on any new music you add.

Once I have calculated the gain on all my MP3s, I sync them with my iPod. I then open the iPod in MP3Gain and apply album gain to all tracks. They are then all at a similar level.

The iPod can be a bit quiet. I use a cmoy anyway, but you can download a program called "eupod" which allows it to go louder. Apple limited it to meet EU safety requirements.

The only flaw in this method is that it does not work on music which I keep on my HDD in FLAC and have WinAMP transcribe to MP3 on the fly, because ReplayGain data is not stored in the tags and because the iPod requires mangled file names MP3Gain can't see songs as albums any more. I usually just use track gain on those files. It might be possible to work around, I'll looking into it.

 

[darwinshardhat]

Soundcheck is pretty lousy for iTunes and iPods. It normalizes everything to the volume of the quietest track in your collection. There is a fantastic program I use called iVolume for iTunes that lets you set what dB you want it at. 90-95 is considered normal range. Before I had headphone amps I like 95 dB, but now that volume isn't an issue, 90dB works out better since it will generally bring everything down slightly. Ideally you don't want it to add volume to anything as that dirties the signal more. You can tailor how it normalizes to your liking, i.e. normalize by album, or song, or do it by song except with compilations, etc. It isn't free but it's been absolutely worth the money to me and works both with the music playing off of your computer and your ipod. I believe it uses Replaygain as it's normalizing engine.

iVolume – listen to music freehand

 

[pata2001]

Quote:

Originally Posted by darwinshardhat /img/forum/go_quote.gif Soundcheck is pretty lousy for iTunes and iPods. It normalizes everything to the volume of the quietest track in your collection.

No, not really. I have songs that soundcheck actually apply an extra +1dB or so.

 

[Duggeh]

iTunes soundcheck only sort of surface scans a file (which is why its much much faster than replaygain) and has no functionality for album gain correction. Every single track is independently changed, for albums like DSOTM, Amarok, or indeed, any album that is properly mastered and therefore has intra-album dynamic range, this destroys the listening experience.

iVolume is the means by which replaygain (the superior system, slower because it fully scans files and has a per album gain correction function) can be applied to iTunes, it costs money but can be used, unlimited, for free, so long as you keep clicking the popup box (just use an automatic mouse clicking software and leave it running over a few nights).

If iTunes is your media player of choice (and for many it is) and you care about volume correction, then Soundcheck simply isnt good enough. With the fact that replaygain is free and open, why Apple bothered to come up with their far inferior system I don't know. I can only assume that they wanted to come up with something faster, my library is 20,000+ tracks and iVolume took days to run through. My reference volume is 89db, but I may lower it slightly as my max attenuation is -12.4 and maximum gain is greater than the maximum +18db at the minute.

 

[mojo]

With WinAMP it can set the Sound Check level on the iPod based on ReplayGain data. Just scan all your music in WinAMP with ReplayGain and then copy it to the iPod using the built-in support.

The reason that ReplayGain uses 89dB because that is the ideal level for CDs to be mastered at. Well, it's not really that simple, but if you have to pick a number that's probably the best one.

iVolume seems to be very slow. My collection is over 16,000 tracks and it only took about 5 hours to calculate ReplayGain for all of them.

The best solution would be to use RockBox on the iPod, but you really need some technical skill. Now the 3G is supported I'm tempted to try it.

 

[antiman]

forgive my ignorance, but does mp3gain work with itunes? do you run it on your music folder, then the changes go into itunes automatically?

be patient with me. i a stupid.

 

[mojo]

You MP3Gain on your music folder. There are basically two stages to it's use.

First, it scans your MP3s and calculates how loud they are. It records that information in the file tags. It does not alter the volume at all, it just calculates it. iTunes does not understand the information in the tags, so it has no effect what so ever.

The second stage is to actually alter the volume. MP3Gain does this by changing the MP3 files directly. It can be completely reversed. Again, iTunes does not notice this, but since the files have been changed it does automatically pick up the volume changes.

The best thing to do really is ditch iTunes, because it is what is holding you back.