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Audio > Music volume issue

#145081 - Lazy1 - Sun Nov 11, 2007 7:50 am

While putting MP3 support into wolf3d I have noticed that the songs vary widely in their volume.
You might barely be able to hear one but the next one will require you to turn down the volume slider on your ds.

Software side I play the same buffer at full volume on both speakers using two channels, this helped in the beginning but the volume problem lies elsewhere I think.

My conversion process:

1) Extract original music
2) Convert music to wav
3) Normalize wav
4) Convert to a 128kbps CBR 32000Hz mono MP3

Any thoughts?

#145084 - keldon - Sun Nov 11, 2007 10:53 am

You can do that, but still don't expect perfect results. Firstly you will lose quality immediately by converting to mp3 (a second time), and secondly, [perceived] loudness is determined by dBA not dBFS, which normalizing uses. So even when normalized music can have completely different levels. Hip hop, for example, has their audio mastered to produce the highest perceived loudness as possible when normalized, whereas classical music prefers to use the full dynamic range. Within the same genre you may be ok.

Having said that, if you can barely hear one, then it might be normalized to a lower level so if you normalize you may be saved from not being able to hear anything .. all depends on the sound source, so normalize but don't expect everything to be the same level.

There is AAMS, which will attempt to truly master each track (producing the same levels).

#145109 - tepples - Sun Nov 11, 2007 7:26 pm

There is a program called "Replay Gain" that can report the dBA of each recording in a folder. You can use this in either of two ways:
  1. Adjust the level in each wave file before converting it to MP3.
  2. Store the level in each MP3 file, and at playback time, read this level and set the volume appropriately.

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