PCA Forums

I ripped a few cd's the other day with this and they turned out real quite. I burned a mixed CD and i have to have the volume on my deck all the way up just to hear them decent... I use Audio Catalyst and they turn out fine... Any way to adjust the gain in it.... Or is there a program i can download that i can tweak the gain with... This is rather annoying cause EAC and Lame make a damn nice MP3 a lot better quality than Audiocatalyst does.

I use Audiograbber and Lame. Audiograbber has a built-in volume normalizer. I normalize everything I rip to 97%

It's important to normalize all your MP3's otherwise when you play back a mixed playlist of tracks from different albums, the volume will jump up and down between tracks - VERY annoying.

I don't want to normalize as that takes away from certain songs from what i've experienced... I just want something to turn the gain up or something that sets the gain at a constant level... Anyone know of a program u can use to do that with? after an mp3 has already been created... I've been searching but haven't come up with anything yet.

Do a search for "Cool Edit Pro". Do you rip the tunes to WAV first? That is normally what I do first, as editing WAV files is easier than MP3's. Here is what I normally do:
1. Rip tunes to WAV format using EAC.
2. I normlize the WAV files to 99% ± 1%.
3. I listen to the WAV and do any editing before converting to MP3.
4. Convert WAV files to MP3's using Razor LAME ( a windows front end for the LAME encoder). I normally use 192 bit rate for the conversion.

WAV Normalizer
Razor LAME front end

I have EAC setup to rip to wav and once thats done lame kicks in and encodes the wav to 256 mp3. I'll play around with it... I prefer not to normalize as it sometimes takes a quieter part in the mp3 that is ment to be there and makes it loud like the rest of it... I like the mp3's to be exactly the same as the cd.

I just want something to turn the gain up or something that sets the gain at a constant level...

That IS normalizing.

I'm very fussy about my sound quality (I listen to a lot of Baroque classical) and I have no problem with normalized audio. Maybe your software uses a poor normalizer algorithm.

I like Audiograbber because you can tell it to only normalize when needed. I only normalize tracks with average levels either under 91% or over 98% and normalize them to 96%.

I don't like to normalize to 99% - that can induce some distortion. You need to leave some headroom.

You can do that wiht EAC also. Set it up to just do certain songs and whatnot. Thanks all for you help i'll play around with it later today.