Ipod volume

[Brad225]

I'm putting new music in my wife's Ipod and need some advice. The volume is all over the place on different CD's.

Is there a program that will automatically adjust the level to be the same?

 

[amey01]

I believe iTunes or the iPod can do this - look for the "Sound check" setting. Not sure whether this operates digitally or in the analogue domain though - and what impact it has on sound quality, so I never use it.

 

[the-chauffeur]

I was gonna dive in with a very similar response (it's one of the options on the iPod menu), but unless I'm mistaken, I don't think it's what you're after. The sound checker is a very rudimentary tool which atttempts to limit the maximum recorded volume of the louder tracks. Unfortunately, it doesn't balance out the volumes across the range, and all that'll happen is you'll end up with a set of quieter tracks.

The simple answer is there's no simple answer, mainly because it would require peak level analysis of each track and then normalising them all. If you've got sound editing software like WaveLab, you can normalise tracks individually - and similarly, you can manually adjust the volume of each track in iTunes - but that's one hell of a process to run on every recording.

I guess it's possible one of the iPod/music editing techies has written some coding that would batch process your library, but I'm sorry to say I haven't seen any yet .

 

[JonFo]

Use sound check

Just use sound check, it stores some meta-data in the track that the player then uses to normalize gain amongst the playlist tracks.

More info:

http://www.mediamonkey.com/mp3-ogg-wma-audio-faq.htm

And check out this utility called iVolume:
http://www.mani.de/en/software/macosx/ivolume/


Similar thing for other platforms is called 'Replay Gain'; See this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_Gain