A Question on CD Burning

Many of you burn Cd's, and I'm sure blend a variety of music throughout your CD's.
My question- can you level the sound? I mean truely level it where the next song doesn't have you racing for the volume knob to turn it down (or up...).
Yes...I know about Replay Gain, and adding it to your music. But I don't think it works when burning to CD's.
Or does it?
Are you laughing out there, saying "you idiot! of course it works!!" ???
Then please- fill me in. teach me.
What CD burning program will do this? Will any? or is there a step to take that I'm missing?
I've tried some software that has not worked. Some say they level the sound, but the results are scary bad.
So please- if you know...can you teach an old dog?

I'm really not sure....who still burns CD's?


I was gonna say replaygain but I see you know about it. Perhaps this is a question that might be better answered over at Hydrogen Audio Forums


I've always been a little skeptical of audio volume leveling, correct me if I'm wrong but in order to achieve constant volume there must be some compression involved..akin to the brickwalled CD's that have become the defacto standard for todays music. I have messed with Goldwave (wonderful program) a few years ago trying to correct the ups and downs on mixed (mashed-up) audio VHS tapes that me and my buddies recorded circa 1999 during some heavy induced beer & weed sessions and in order for me to correct it so that the volume was relatively the same I needed to compress the snot out of it, effectively killing all the dynamic range. Was never very happy with the end result and it never did help level a "thin" sounding track versus a "thick" sounding track.

But I hear you, volume levels, especially in the last 10 years, have gotten so loud that its hard to make a proper mixed CD (or in my case, a folder for my Rockboxed DAP iRiver iHP-120). Thats why I make folders of my favorites by decade - volume levels are all basicly the same (watch them remasters!), the music tracks "match up" with the era and its just a good way to throw a few hundred songs of all genre's into a mix.


If you find a good way to do level out volume without butchering the recording, please post about it here as I would be interested myself.

I don't believe Replay Gain tags exist on wav files (We are talking about brunt CDs containing wav files, right?). It's basically a tag (typically in a FLAC file) telling the audio playback software to change the output to a specific level. Having that tag doesn't change the "sound containing" part of the file.

If you want to make an audio CD where all the files have the same volume, you'll need to alter the wav files themselves, losing the "losslessness". You will kill the dynamic range, like Kitlope said. Sadly, there is no way that I know to obtain the result you want from burnt audio cds containing wav files. I think what you might need is a good wav editor software to do that manual volume modification, but you would not have lossless audio files any more.

I understand it can be quite annoying to have mix cds with songs of very different volume levels. I only listen to albums and don't mind turning my volume knob on my stereo. But nowadays, I mostly play FLACs from my computer or wavs from my portable media player or CDs or LPs from my Stereo. I never burn stuff any more.

I think the most effective way to do this would be to add tracks to a CD that all have one thing in common: a particular "loudness". Whether its quiet, thin, thick, loud, stupid loud - make your CD's according to this guideline and you will have minimized the varying loudness levels.

This is why I have organized my stuff by decade. Volumes are still all over the place but not nearly as bad as it would be if I mixed music from all decades (I realize too their is "remasters" for a lot of stuff now but I avoid them when I can since all they have done is compress & brickwall the sound, which on a good mid fi stereo usually sounds like shit).

Give this a read - very very good information.


The Loudness Wars

It's true, nearly all new remasters are complete crap! You can't hear anything as everything is just LOUD AS HELL / ipod ready. Absolutely not nice on the ears

Kitlope wrote:I'm really not sure....who still burns CD's?

Well, I do, and the reason is simple: record labels seems to believe that down here everyone likes teenager pop, so the music I like is almost impossible to find in record stores. But anyway, back to topic...

As was stated above, it's impossible to burn "replay-gained" files without altering (aka butchering) them. But if you, like me, just need to normalise the volumes of different tunes to burn a CD for the car from time to time, a good tool is WaveGain:



It's a command line utility, you can get the frontend here (from the same guy who wrote the FLAC frontend). I recommend using Radio gain if you're mixing files from different sources, and I usually apply an Extra gain of 4 dB. It only works with WAV files, so you need to convert your FLACs first. Remember that the output files are altered, so work with backups if you want to keep your "original" unmodified files. The resulting WAV files can then be burnt using your favourite burner (Burrrn in my case).

HTH.

Very cool. Thanks all!

and Kit...I know. I don't burn many anymore. My ipod is the "vehicle" of choice now. 8000+ tunes, in something that is as addictive as whats in a cigarette package- with no side effects...(in the car. on the comp at home with foo...)

Charlie, Rockbox is a great 3rd party firmware that you may be able to install on your ipod as it will open up a ton of new formats , settings & options. Check it out. www.rockbox.org

Troma, thanks for the info on Wavegain. Will be potentially worth checking out and using for the nondisconcerning ear. I sometimes get requests from friends & coworkers for mixed CD's so Wavegain will be a perfect solution for crazy volume differences.

Doesn't EAC "normalize" ? It's in the EAC options.

It will do that to any file, .wav or otherwise, as it changes the file.

Why would you do that? Hmmmm lets consider the options.

In an album, the volume changes were supposed to be there so you just don't do it.

In a compilation it doesn't matter so normalize is the way to go. Just remember that your files are changed so you no longer have an identical copy.

Replay gain has an album gain tag however all the talk of replay gain is pie in the sky because cd players can't make use of the tag anyway.
I may be wrong so apologies in advance

Oz