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Posted by on Oct 3, 2012 in Guides / Tips, Multimedia, Windows |

What is and how to normalize your MP3 volume

What is and how to normalize your MP3 volume

Have you ever heard the term normalization of audio, not quite sure what he meant? As a lover of music and technology, I found myself with such questions for many years. Basically, giving a short definition, standardization is the volume, or rather, of the audio spectrum with respect to other issues, usually of the same disc.

And that, to put it more simply, is matching the of different tracks on a disc. The reasons are many, and usually if the tracks are taken from the same work these already have the same volume and gain, but what happens if we make a mixtape? For example, we decided to make a compilation called The Top 100 Songs of Rock history. Surely Expect issues Beatles or The Rolling Stones, and therefore different albums. Depending on the year, type of mastering, etc etc, we end up with a CD that contains many different volumes, which can be annoying when listening. That is only one reason to normalize our collection.

There are plugins for players that allow us to normalize on the fly. In fact we can say that programs like Spotify already do this by choosing to match volume of all the songs, but the application that I present below allows us to normalize permanently modifying MP3 files.

This is QMP3Gain, noted for its ease of use and comes in an interface that is ideal to understand exactly what a standardization and see the before and after. When you open the application we have a window where you have a grid, which will be populated when we add files or folders, and a keypad with various options.

The first serve precisely to add files and folders. Let us add, to test two different albums or a selection of different themed discs. Once we have issues, we realize that something is wrong: The grid does not show the gain and volume data. Actually it is not a problem, but something normal, and to analyze all the issues the processor can take some time, so you will need to do a manual scan. Just go to the menu and run analysis we will be receiving data volume and gain, as well as clipping, a column that specifies whether the item contains sound clips or failures caused by high gain, causing distortion.

How to normalize? Suffice it to change the gain through the specific menu for this. If you select the option constant constant-gain-gain will be applying the same standard to all selected topics. By the way, this applies to both channels by default or a specific channel, something that probably do not need but is nice to have on hand.

Pressing OK the application will get to work and keep our files with the same gain, making it ideal before the first tests do a backup. Keep in mind that this is an operation that can take time, which depends on the speed of your processor, the number of subjects and also to standardize the size and quality of them.

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