djmatthill Posted November 24, 2008 Share Posted November 24, 2008 Hi there , Iv got another question. As you may know Im running a community radio station. We are using a computer playout system (JAZZLER). The MP3`s we are using are of different volume levels , and when mixing from one to another some are louder or quieter than others. This means our music levels are all over the place and means it hard for us to set our limiters etc. Can anyone tell me if there is a programme or piece of software that I can use that will NORMALIZE (make all the volume levels the same)all my MP3`s. Need to do a batch conversion as we have over 5,000 tracks. Has anyone on here used such a piece of software and CAN reccomend it to me. I DO NOT want the software to degrade or spoil the quality of the MP3`s. I know its not a normal question for BLUEROOM im hoping that you sound professionals can offer me some advice. Thanks . Matt & jen Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mervaka Posted November 24, 2008 Share Posted November 24, 2008 I'd say cue it up and use the fader. however, if you want to modify the data without further degrading the quality, you'd need to reencode it lossless. use audacity, or audition if you can get access to it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bruce Posted November 24, 2008 Share Posted November 24, 2008 I'd say cue it up and use the fader.That's fine for live play, but not automated jukebox or voicetracked. I don't know anything about the playout software mentioned, but the systems that I have encountered have had facilties to normalise audio tracks when they were imported/ripped. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trunker Posted November 24, 2008 Share Posted November 24, 2008 Audacity is a free download from the 'net. It should do for what you want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jammie300 Posted November 24, 2008 Share Posted November 24, 2008 I'll second Audacity. One of the best freeware out there The downside it will be painstakingly slow for 5000 tracks! Hope you have a month or two going free. James Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
themadhippy Posted November 24, 2008 Share Posted November 24, 2008 How about mp3 gain dont know if will do batch conversion,but being open source you can tweak it however you like Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shez Posted November 24, 2008 Share Posted November 24, 2008 Bear in mind that normalising won't make them all sound the same volume - it'll just make them all peak to the same level, which isn't the same thing. Unfortunately, I doubt you'll find a way of automatically making them all sound the same level; fingers on faders will always do a better job. Having said that, if your transmission processing has an AGC in addition to the usual compression/limiting, it should help keep things at a reasonably steady level.Also, any operation that you perform on an MP3 will require it to be re-encoded which will degrade the quality even further. If you convert to wav, do any volume changes necessary and save as a wav (no re-encoding), you'll preserve what remains of the quality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mutley Posted November 24, 2008 Share Posted November 24, 2008 A few years ago I used a program called MP3 Workshop that would do exactly what you want to do. You can also resample (up or down) convert to mono, etc. :) I think rather than normalise by peak, you want to normalise by RMS. That takes the whole track volume into account and normalises it as an average (Root Mean Square), rather than by the loudest peak. I'm not sure if it does peak or RMS normalising.I know that the past few versions of Nero (Wave Editor) have had the ability to normalise by RMS and by peak, (as well as resample) but that is on an individual track by track basis :D . ....Do you not have a work experience kid to do it?! :D ...Or just give the job of normalising 100 tracks (by RMS), to the "muppet of the week". ie; the person who makes the biggest ######-up that week! That's how we allocate our crappy jobs at work! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobbsy Posted November 25, 2008 Share Posted November 25, 2008 A question for those of you recommending Audacity: Will Audacity work natively in MP3 or does it convert the file to WAVE or some other uncompressed format for processing, then re-compress back to MP3 when you save? I ask this because the vast majority of audio editing programmes go the "convert on import" route. This is fine if you also save uncompressed, but the compression artefacts on concatenated MP3 codings mount up and become objectionable very quickly. If Audacity works this way I'd say this would rule it out for this job. I've heard of MP3 Workshop as recommended by Mutley and have heard good things about it but have no personal experience. Being honest, I consider MP3 the spawn of the devil and would never use it for any professional applications and certainly not at a stage in the editing/mixing process. Bob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bruce Posted November 25, 2008 Share Posted November 25, 2008 Bob's right - audacity would do an "import from MP3/Export to Mp3" procedure. And the batch processing features are a bit clunky... On a more fundamental point - why is the OP using mp3? Professional broadcasters - and indeed most community broadcasters - would use an uncompressed format. It's not just a playout quality issue (we're broadcasting on AM - CD quality isn't critical here!), it's also about latency, and the ability to edit without dropping quality significantly. Yes, it takes a lot more diskspace. But disks are cheap these days. I've just installed another mirrored terabyte device... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobbsy Posted November 25, 2008 Share Posted November 25, 2008 I couldn't agree more with Bruce. I just bought a 1 terabyte Lacie external HDD for my home studio for $220 Australian...that's about £90. It would have been cheaper if I could have used an internal drive but this was for use with a notebook. When you consider how much material you can store in a terabyte, why compress? Bob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dmills Posted November 25, 2008 Share Posted November 25, 2008 Going back to the original question, mp3gain will do what you want (batch mode normalization to a fixed level), and it does not 'normalize in the strict sense of the phrase, but actually uses some statistical measure to try to get perceived volumes the same. mp3 gain does its thing by fiddling with the scale factors rather then by converting to PCM and then re encoding, so it should be cleaner then the approach using an audio editor. If your playout software supports the mp3gain tag, it can do this my marking each file with a gain value then having the playout system do the right thing. I do second the comments on not storing as mp3 for broadcast, apart from anything else the psychoacoustic model gets stuffed up by the airchain processing. MP2 is actually better in this respect, which is why you sometimes see it in use in broadcast automation, but even that is becoming markedly less common as disks get cheap. AGC is fine, but completely stuffs up any and all dynamics, possibly the right thing to do on AM, but Fm is capable of so much better. Regards, Dan. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PYROmaster Posted November 25, 2008 Share Posted November 25, 2008 There is a neat little program out there called dBPoweramp.Very handy and will batch process if you want it to.Most of the features are free, or you can use them for a period of time.But the licence isn't that expensive, I could afford it Very good program would deffinately reccomend it to anyone! http://www.dbpoweramp.comhttp://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm http://www.dbpoweramp.com/batch-ripper.htm As for those of you saying Audacity, why? that would be so tedious and it doesn't come with an MP3 codec.... Hope this helps ! =) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mervaka Posted November 25, 2008 Share Posted November 25, 2008 dont get me wrong, I much prefer audition. I just dont think he has a budget for this, and I'm certainly not going to advocate warez or torrent sites to 'make' it free. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobbsy Posted November 25, 2008 Share Posted November 25, 2008 Actually, Audition would have exactly the same problem. It converts to a form of wave file for processing then re-encodes to MP3 if you save to that format, with the attendant loss of quality. Yes, the batch processing is better but the main issue would still be there. Bob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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