audacity projects sounding quiet compared to other music

[OggOrbisRecords]

after exporting my music, it seems to be much quieter than other songs on my computer and the internet. I amplify everything as much as possible before it starts to crackle and pop, but I can't seem to get it up there. I record everything in 32bit floating point stereo so that I can get great sounding stuff, and I try to use the eq to help with boosting sound, but I am still way off. I was hoping someone might know of a maxamizing plug-in or some other method of getting this boosted sound

[kozikowski]

<<<after exporting my music>>>

More English words.

Export as what? What are you playing the work on? Given this forum title, which kind of computer are you on?

QuickTime Player, iTunes, Windows Media?

Give us a push.

Koz

[steve]

As kozikowski said, more detail would make it easier to answer, but I think what you are asking for are "Compressor" and "Leveller" effects. (You may need to use "Normalise" after the compression).

[alatham]

There's a lot more to making a signal sound loud than just compressing it. Ideally you should be compressing each track individually, and possibly even cutting each track into different "frequency bands" so you can compress each of those individually (aka a multi-band compressor).

A very quick (and dirty) way of doing this involves the "fast lookahead limiter" included with the LADSPA effects pack:
http://audacityteam.org/download/plugins

[OggOrbisRecords]

<<<after exporting my music>>>

More English words.

Export as what? What are you playing the work on? Given this forum title, which kind of computer are you on?

QuickTime Player, iTunes, Windows Media?

Give us a push.

Koz

I export my work as an mp3, and I play it on Itunes. I have an old hp with only 248mb of ram and an extremely small hard drive.

[steve]

A very quick (and dirty) way of doing this involves the "fast lookahead limiter" included with the LADSPA effects pack:http://audacityteam.org/download/plugins

Cheers alatham, I was going to suggest that, but I couldn't remember where I got the "fast lookahead limiter" from.

[OggOrbisRecords]

Thank you guys for suggesting the Fast lookahead limiter, it worked just great. that whole set of plug ins actually helped a lot. I had downloaded them once before but after seeing how many there were I never bothered looking through them, I just stuck to the normal ones.

[alatham]

There are a few real gems in that pack. I really like the Decimator, it approximates the sound of lower bit-depths and makes a really cool effect if you fade it in along the length of a track.