equal volume levels

[coffee]

No problem Barry.

I am pleased to say that I have solved the problem. It really works very well. It takes about 3 - 5 minutes to normalize an entire DVD, depending on the size of it.
I am busy trying to get the bulk prossessing working and fine tuning it so that anybody can use it with ease. Give me a few days to sort everything out and I will post a tatorial on how to do it.

Coffee

[Barcrest]

Sounds cool, i think i will run my videos through it as the levels are all over the price.

[eist1]

Glad to hear it actually works on the videos...

[coffee]

OK, bulk prosessing is working now and I have speed it up. It takes 1 - 2 minutes to normalize an entire DVD now. I still have to check how much quality loss there is. I already checked the sound quality and that is fine. I just need to check video quality.

[coffee]

The input bitrate and output bitrate is the same. So there is also no loss in video quality.

[cyko]

so MP3 gain has been running for approx 18 hours and is done 87% of my 10,000 MP3s.   

[eist1]

At least you didn't have to do them one by one huh? That's about the same rate it took to do mine.

[just_buck]

Could someone please help me understand this, because this makes me NERVOUS!!!!

I installed the MP3Gain, just went w/ the default settings for 89db.

First thing I noticed is just about all tracks are a - number by album gain (negative that is)
and there are TONS and I mean TONS that have a Y by clipping....

Clipping is what has me nervous, by letting it do it's thing, what are my risks w/ that clipping?
Of course, I keep a backup of all my music (not stupid here)...
But just restoring the music takes over 24 hours coping across the network.

Any advice?  I would appreciate it!!!

Then.....  next comes the videos!

[eist1]

If your tracks are showing up in red, and showing clipping y, it means that the original setting was below what you are changing it to (89), so it might have been 87 or 85. I have many files that are showing clipping, and I have never had a problem, the only time I could see a problem is if the original setting was 50 and you changed it to 89, where there is a big difference. You can actually see the original setting as it is processing the track, you'll see the original setting flash up, then it will change it to 89, so you'll know how off it is. If you do run into issues, the easiest way to rollback is to go into MP3Gain, choose your tracks, then go up to Modify Gain/Undo Gain Changes and it will set the tracks back to their original settings. Much easier than doing a restore...

[coffee]

To undo the gain with mp3gain is very quick. Eist1 is correct you won't easily hear the differents if a track is clipped. The only place you'll see it is maybe on a movie or when you prosses classical music where you have very low and very loud sounds. In this case you may hear a bit of distortion at high pitch.
Mp3gain has a function "do not clip" when prossesing, but it doesn't work either with GUI or with command line switching.
You can also try a program called "BeSweet" to normalize your music. I know that some people like this one better, but personally I use mp3gain because I can set it more accurately.

Coffee

[netcat]

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: not dissin anybody or sugesting that these are not all wonderfull ideas/sugestions, just my opinion and if you ask my wife she will be more than happy to tell you my opinion doesnt count anyways.

given my massive multimedia library (which is growing) I cant help but wonder.

Wouldnt on "on the fly" normalizer that works on anything coming out of the speaker save everyone a lot of time and agravation, plus you would never have to worry about it again for future media.

As I said I tried a hardware solution (which didnt work at all) but has anyone managed to make the software one Barry was a talking about work???

or How difficult would it be to build into the software??? if it is easy enough and we all pitch in we may be able to persuade Mr. Barcrest to implement this feature

[coffee]

Hi Netcat

I will really second that motion. The problem is that I have tried it twice allready but I couldn't get it to work. Maybe you can give it a try, it's called "DCDSPFilter_v1.03_Installer.zip" and you can find it at         http://dsp-worx.de/index.php?n=4     .
Maybe you will have more luck.

Coffee

[eist1]

Personally I use MP3Gain to normalize my MP3's so I can use them on my Ipod or any other portable devices, and get the same volume level. Building it into Freebox would be great, but for me I would then run into issues later down the road.

[netcat]

I tried making work as well thus so far unsuccesfully, perhaps Barry can give us more detail on how he made it work?

[coffee]

Yeah, I can't figure out the options menu.