There are special purpose editors such as mp3DirectCut that can do limited editing (including volume adjustment) without decompressing the file. Or if you are stuck with MP3 originals, try to minimize the number of times it's re-compressed. Ideally, if you want MP3 you should start with an uncompressed file and compress ONCE as the last step. You may not hear any quality loss but it's something to be aware of. If you re-export as MP3 you are going through another generation of lossy compression and the "damage" does accumulate. When you open a compressed file in Audacity (or any normal audio editor) it gets decompressed. Adjust the louder songs down to match the reference.Īs you may know, MP3 is lossy compression. If they are different choose the quietest song as your reference.Ĥ. Listen to the songs (or check LUFS) and if they are volume matched, you're done!ģ. Use the Amplify or Normalize effect to "maximize" all of the songs.Ģ. If you want to volume-match a limited number of songs (10 or 20 songs to be burned onto a CD, etc.) here is a procedure:ġ. LUFS isn't "perfect', and two different people may not agree when two different songs are "equally loud", especially if the songs are different styles/genres or one or both are highly dynamic (very-loud and very-quiet parts in the same song).
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And/or if you want to measure LUFS loudness without changing it there is a free 3rd-party plug-in called dpMeter4.Īgain, you have to be careful with loudness normalization or (RMS normalization) because you can get clipping (distortion) if you amplify too much. You can use it to set the LUFS loudness (which is an international standard for measuring the loudness of digital audio). Little more listening back and forth, but all good.Ī couple of things you might want to "play with".Īudacity recently added an effect called Loudness Normalization. Yeah, I'll just stick with trying to get everything around "par" with "uping" and "downing" the gain. * You can make the quiet songs louder with dynamic compression or limiting but that makes the music less dynamic. (Since MP3Gain changes the actual MP3 file volume, it works on any player.) For these, you need a compatible audio player.
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They work with your player software to make a volume adjustment at playback time. (and Apple's Sound Check) use similar algorithms except they don't change the loudness of the actual files. That means many quiet or average-loudness songs can't be made louder without potential clipping and the only way to volume match is to make the loud songs quieter.* If you've got enough analog gain/volume that's not a problem, but some people are disappointed when their music is quieter after using MP3 gain (or other volume matching methods). Note that most commercial music (including many quiet-sounding songs) is already normalized ("maximized") for 0dB peaks.