I use iTunes to burn audio CDs and as a source for files for my Handspring Prism equippped with an Innogear MP3 player.

It all works fine, but I have one major gripe. Depending I assume on the recording volume level of the source, my MP3 files play back at diferent volumes on my CD player and Prism. This is extremely inrritating, as you go from loud to soft to loud, etc. as you work through your playlist. I use the iTunes volume adjustment option with some success to keep volumes consistent when playing back MP3s using iTunes, but this doesn't seem to carry over to MP3s burned on audio CDs or transferred to my Prism.

Any ideas on how to get consistent volume levels?

Encode your mp3s with an encoder that has a normalize option.

I wonder if this always works.

I experienced a quiet CD, which I tried to encode with iTunes first. I tried again under Windows by ripping to WAV, normalize and then encode but did not have any significant success.

Felix

No, it might not always work...it might be quiet music with spikes of sound, that will not gain from a normalize. It should be properly compressed then. But remember, not all music are supposed to be equal levels. Different styles of music require different volume level.

Still, normalizing should do the trick most of the times. Try AudioCatalyst, which can normalize your encodings...

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Erik K. Veland
That's no ordinary rabbit

What you need is a .aiff editor that can let you boost the output level and resave the file. Unfortunately, as I understand it (since I don't burn CDs on my Ti but only under Windoze), iTunes doens't let you open and handle the .aiff files that it uses to burn the CDs.

So you're sort of stuck if your, er, mp3s can't ... uhm ... be reencoded (b/c you've, say, lost the CDs that you used to rip them?).

It's a pain on Windoze too but I've been able to use a .wav editor to boost the gain on quiet songs to get a fairly even volume distribution throughout a CD. There are some Mac programs out there that let you edit .aiff files (none free that I know of) but, once you've done this you may have to use a program other than iTunes to burn your CD (my impression is that you cannot use iTunes to grab a bunch of .aiff files that you have in a folder and burn them but I could be wrong).

Otherwise if you get a .aiff editor, you could have the track converted back to mp3 by iTunes and then rip your CD but I suspect you'd be looking as significant sound degradation from bouncing it back and forth like that.

catman

Plenty of shareware audio editors on the mac.

Search www.versiontracker.com

[This message has been edited by - - e r i k - - (edited 05-25-2001).]

Good point, I had only gone through a couple of Mac audio sites and found Jasmine and Sound Studio but both of these are time limited demos. After poking around for a while in the audio section on Version Tracker I found sonicWORX basic 1.0 which will definitely do part of the job on a .aiff file with its "Normalize" command.

The thing that bugs me about things like this is that you don't have the control as a user to accept a bit of clipping in some places to really boost up the gain on the rest of a quiet track. The program determines the Max Level and normalizes to that. So even if it's a microsecond long bit of a track that is much louder than the rest, you're limited by that. At least the program is free (so I won't complain about the dialogue boxes that pop up in German ).

To reiterate though, I believe you still need to use a burning program other than iTunes if you want to create CDs with modified .aiff files.

catman

OK one more program: SoundHack (you can get this one from VersionTracker as well):

This one requires a bit more technical expertise (intuition?). But the Change Gain function in there is much more customizable. If you analyze a track using it it will suggest gain factors for each channel but you're free to enter whatever values you want so you can use the suggested factors as a guide and beat the sh*t out of the output level of the track to your heart's content. Plus the verison that's available is free.

Good software, steep learning curve on the interface but you can get a manual here: http://www.soundhack.com/SHDoc.RTF.hqx

catman

edit - fixed url

[This message has been edited by mycatsnameis (edited 05-25-2001).]

You can use iTunes to burn the modified .aiff files, you can select the 'convert to MP3...' item in the advanced menu, and this will convert your modified .aiff files back to MP3's so that you can use iTunes to burn the CD still.

Hope this helps



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Adam Skelton
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Check out my new website...
www.toiletmaster.com

True, my only concern though is that you may end up with significant audio artifacts from having gone .aiff=>mp3=>.aiff(edit)=>mp3=>.aiff (CD-R).

I'm not sure if the recompression back to mp3 the second time will take out more info than conversion number one.

If you _own_ the CDs that you're ripping then the best thing is to rip it directly as a .aiff (again, not using iTunes), modify it to boost the signal and then use a different burning program (e.g. HP EZCD creator) to burn it to a new CD.

catman