How can I make all the songs in a playlist be the same volume?

July 11, 2007 6:47 PM

Is there a way in iTunes (or another application) to make all of the songs on a playlist be approximately the same volume?

I am making a wedding/iPod DJ playlist. I get annoyed when a song was ripped at a low volume. Is there a way to fix this so that all songs are at the same volume?

posted by k8t to media & arts (9 answers total)

Edit -> Preferences -> Playback -> [x] Sound Check?
posted by Who_Am_I at 6:55 PM on July 11, 2007

Sound Check (for me) actually makes things worse. I would also like to know an answer to this question.
posted by Nabubrush at 6:59 PM on July 11, 2007

The only other way I can think of to do this easily would be to go into the options for each song, and set the per-song volume adjustment appropriately. (Quiet songs, bring the volume up to 110% or so, loud ones cut down to 80%.)

The only other way would be to take the songs out of your library, run them through a sound-editing tool like Audacity and try Normalizing them. (After reducing the amplitude of any spikes in quiet songs.)

I have also found that Sound Check doesn't seem to do much good, so I use per-song EQ and volume settings extensively.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:05 PM on July 11, 2007

What you are trying to do is normalize your audio library. Lifehacker had a pretty good disscussion on how to do this.
posted by bigmusic at 7:06 PM on July 11, 2007 [3 favorites]

There's a thing called replaygain which stored loudness values in metadata. I was first introduced to it using foobar2000 (best audio player ever!). It can scan and store levels on a per track basis or on a per album basis.

Nowadays I use Amarok on my linux box and it also supports replaygain, though in a kinda crude way by raising and lowering the volume (foobar uses a pre-amp-ish level and leaves the volume alone).

Alternately, you can normalize with programs like mp3gain or aacgain or vorbisgain, but these actually change the music file to accomplish the volume change.
posted by cmm at 7:07 PM on July 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

I've seen better results from iVolume than Sound Check. Like replaygain, mp3gain, etc., it just saves a value in the metadata, and it backs up the original setting in case you want to revert later. It's Mac-only, if that matters; the other suggestions so far appear to be the Windows equivalents.
posted by Acetylene at 7:13 PM on July 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

MP3Gain does this as well.
posted by futility closet at 8:19 PM on July 11, 2007

Acetylene, I just tried iVolume, its perfect, thanks.
posted by doctor_negative at 10:08 PM on July 11, 2007

No never normalize but use "ReplayGain
posted by zouhair at 1:08 PM on July 12, 2007