Burning CD's

[George Lewis]

Hi Mike,
Just to add what you probably already know.
The tracks should sound level at the volumes they will be used at. Nothing worse than a BT that sounds fine when trying not to disturb the neighbours, but the bass causes heart palpitations or the treble slices your ears off when cranked up.
Some digital processing algorithms take this "perceived loudness" into account, but really if you want accuracy it does need human ear intervention. (and not aurally challenged ones at that !)
cheers
George

[Detailed Infinity]

Hi Mike, it's picture time again !!

Audacity and Wavosaur (both free) normalise to Peak Level but they aren't batch converters. These will do what you want but each track has to be loaded and processed individualy. Prbablry not a bad thing actual--you can preview them before saving.

Here's some blurb on the subject. http://lifehacker.com/5621081/how-do-i-normalize-the-audio-in-my-music-and-video-collection

Br

[pinktwanger]

Mike
For what it is worth I use Sound Forge but still get differences in volume between different tracks when played back via full PA setup unless I do the following. I now do a final adjustment on Sound Forge (could be any software) monitoring via full PA setup comparing the levels with the first backing track I ever did so at least I get a constant reference point. It is a pain but it is the only accurate method I have found so far.
My point is even if you buy Sound Forge you might be disappointed with the final result.
Hope this helps.
Ben

[MikeAB]

At first brief 'play' with it Wavosaur looks like it does what I'm after - quite happy to fiddle with individual tracks and anyway in fact there aren't too many I didn't manage to level with Nero when I used to use it - and I agree batch levelling won't ever probably work.

Thanks to everyone for their expert help


Mike

[MikeAB]

Just to finish off this saga - Wavosaur works beautifully. Needs a bit of trial and error as the sound of the track played straight off the computer sounds a fair bit louder than it will on CD eg I dropped Wild Theme by 24db's to get it sounding where I wanted it to on the PC - but this was almost inaudible on CD, where dropping it by only 8 db's did the trick.

That probably means the other suggestion of the Volume Balancer might be more effective when put onto CD then directly off the computer? Haven't tried that yet.

Mike