Audacity Forum

I use audacity to record my dj mixes. I record in 2 channel stereo 32 bit at 44100hz. the recording looks and sounds fine. the levels dont go into red but are close. For some reason after I save a wav file and convert it to mp3 the volume drops dramatically. It always looks normal when i open it and i cant really boost the gain much more. why are my mp3's coming out so quiet?

Hello,

Try to open your MP3 file with audacity, and boost the gain one more time, to my mind it should work.


PS: you should post here: http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=12, 'cause there you're in the french part of the forum!

When you apply the "Amplify" effect, it will be set automatically to the maximum amount of amplification that can be applied without clipping.

kpcannon wrote:why are my mp3's coming out so quiet?

Compared with what?
Many DJ mixes have the dynamics compressed to a huge extent to make them sound louder. They do this by applying compression, and a hard limiter to squash down all the loud peaks in the music, thus allowing the track to be further amplified.

In this picture you can see the original audio file as a stereo track at the top, then below it is a copy of the same track after applying the "Fast Lookahead Limiter" effect (available in the plug-in pack that can be downloaded from the main Audacity web site). The second track used the limiter with a fast release time (0.050 seconds) to maximize the compression effect, and then the "Normalize" effect was used to bring it back up to 0dB. The result is that the processed track is much louder, but with the loss of dynamics (the whole track sounds loud).