Does Amplify Boost EQ?

[Bobcat22]

For much of the time using Audacity I thought that Amplify was Audacity’s terms for Normalize, my mistake. In trying to:

• raise the output level of an existing MP3
• keep the album art cover
• did not want to save as an WAV file
• did not want to have to re-encode

I decided to use MP3DirectCut so I normalized, manually cropped and “Auto Cropped” around 350 MP3 files. Some had apparent EQ boost after normalization, while others did not.

Until I explored more closely, I did not realize that Audacity’s Amplify was entirely a different function from Normalize. Has anyone experienced EQ boost using Amplify?

[Gale_Andrews]

@Bobcat22

For much of the time using Audacity I thought that Amplify was Audacity’s terms for Normalize, my mistake. In trying to:

• raise the output level of an existing MP3
• keep the album art cover
• did not want to save as an WAV file
• did not want to have to re-encode

I decided to use MP3DirectCut so I normalized, manually cropped and “Auto Cropped” around 350 MP3 files. Some had apparent EQ boost after normalization, while others did not.

As already explained, these are pyschoacoustic effects.

For support with MP3DirectCut, you need to ask here: http://www.mpex.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=17 .

@Bobcat22

Until I explored more closely, I did not realize that Audacity’s Amplify was entirely a different function from Normalize.

They are not entirely different but have different purposes. Please read: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Amplify_and_Normalize .

@Bobcat22

Has anyone experienced EQ boost using Amplify?

Please don’t start new topics asking questions that have already been answered.

As already explained, humans perceive bass frequencies more than treble for any given volume level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour .

So if you increase the volume (by any method) you may hear more bass frequencies than before.

Also try opening a song in Audacity’s Analyze > Plot Spectrum. As you can see the lower frequency sounds are naturally louder than the higher ones.

I’m locking this topic now.


Gale