How to increase Volume in MP3 Recording

Hi

I’m new to this forum, I’ve used Audacity for odd things years ago but not recently so not familiar with it as much. I have an AMR I’ve converted it to MP3 voice recording of my voice that I’d like to increase the volume on its very low, I use VLC but the extra volume feature didn’t make it loud enough, is there some feature in Audacity that could help me make the recoding sound louder.

Thanks

Effect → Amplify. Your file has been pre-scanned and the Amplify effect will default to the maximum you can get without clipping (distorting). This is usually called “normalizing”, where the level is adjusted for 0dB peaks (the “digital maximum”).

I have an AMR

I don’t know what that is…

I’ve converted it to MP3

This is not a big deal with voice but it’s best if you convert to MP3 as the last step after any editing/processing. As you may know MP3 is lossy compression. When you open an MP3 (or any compressed format) in Audacity (or any “regular” audio editor) it gets decompressed. If you then re-export as MP3 you are going through another generation of lossy compression and some damage accumulates. You may not notice any quality loss but it’s something you should be aware of.

A codec / file format used on phones (and possibly elsewhere) - Adaptive Multi-Rate audio codec.

I don’t know if we can expect high fidelity from it to start with, but nevertheless the point stands - best to minimise the number of conversions. From a quick search, it looks like Audacity can read .amr files directly “with ffmpeg installed” - I don’t know the status of that on Windows.

The Amplify Tool can increase the volume, but an audio file may still sound weak if the dynamic range therein is very large (such as in Blueray audio streams that are almost always absurdly engineered). In any case, adding compression to reduce the dynamic range will greatly increase playback volume without clipping.