Does Amplify Boost EQ?

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?

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 .

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

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