[LAU] Level Matching

[James McDermott]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 1:53 AM, Bob van der Poel <bob at mellowood.ca> wrote:
> I've used the program "normalize-audio" a number of times to good
> effect.

> Folderol wrote:
>> they
>> are all recorded at completely different levels which make playing a
>> program of them a bit problematical.
>>
>> Does anyone know of an automated way I can bring these all to a
>> similar listening level.

I see that there is a replaygain script for Amarok, though I haven't
used it. If you can get it to work, replaygain is probably the best
solution, since it doesn't change the data (as normalize-audio does, I
believe) but rather sets an id3 (?) tag.

Be warned though that there is no perfect solution, since different
types of music are compressed differently. No matter what strategy one
adopts, a classical piece will have quiet parts and loud parts, and
whichever of these you try to match with the volume of a pop piece,
the other will sound wrong. Then of course there's the tricky issue of
whether to change the volume per-song or per-album...

HTH :)

jmmcd