Normalise (Normalize)

[dave-t]

Hi

I am current in the process of setting up an internet only radio station which, I hope, will be ?on-air? in January 2013.

So far, I have sorted, de-duped, tagged and catalogued 20k of the 100k audio files in my current collection (adding to this collection all of the time!).

Over the entire collection there is a significant difference in the ?volume? of the tracks and am looking to see what recommendations you have to deal with this.

I am not an audio engineer and therefore am looking for an ?idiots? guide.
I note that there are utilities out there to ?normalise? (British spelling) tracks and that RB also has an automatic gain control. The question is which method do I use?

Normalising does give me some concerns as some track are supposed to be quiet and the volume over an entire track will vary ? am I looking to ?normalise? the entire track or just the peak?
All files are 320kbs MP3?s

Regards

Dave

 

[radium98]

use mp3gain free best normaliser i used before apply to rb also use the agc preset 2 and if u want on the fly use some dsp winamp agc

good luck for new radio

 

[dave-t]

Thanks

What would you reccomend as the traget volume in MP3Gain and should I use the defaults settings in RB?

Looking forward to getting the station "on-air" but a lot of hard work and learning to do 

Regards

Dave

 

[radium98]

Dave hi i used this tool with 98% set threshold to 98 and not the default to 89 theses are my experience

 

[djsoft]

It's better to normalize tracks than to use AutoAmp AGC. Any AGC will reduce music dynamic (eg. a part supposed to be quiet will become louder and so on), which is not good in some situations.

You can also use ReplayGain - it's a special tag which tells on what volume the track should be played. Good thing is that audio contents are not modified and you can change or remove normalization any time without quality loss. Settings for ReplayGain in RadioBOSS are located under Settings->Playback->Miscellaneous.
More about this technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayGain

 

[dave-t]

Many thanks for this, it has been very helpful

Dave