Need Help To Get All Projects The Same Volume

[Lawrie]

First, a little background:

At the moment, I record two tracks on every project (or tune), a bass track and a drum track. I record the individual tracks in mono and connect my laptop to my bass rig for playback. I always use the "amplify" feature to balance out the the bass and drum tracks to my liking after recording. I use these tunes for jamming and gigging purposes and it sounds great. I've recorded about 35 tunes so far.

What I would like to do next is to have all the tunes playback as close to the same volume level as humanly possible. At first, I was thinking of exporting all the tunes to mp3 format and then using MP3Gain. The problem is that the audio quality suffers being only 128k. I then thought I would export the files to wav for better quality and find a freeware program to normalize the tunes. Again, I'm concerned about the audio quality.

So how would I go about getting all my recorded tunes to have the same output volume without exporting them to some other format? Keep in mind that I need to maintain the individual bass/drum track volume balance already set at the time of recording.

Thanks in advance

[steve]

How long are the tracks?
How much RAM does your computer have?

[Lawrie]

How long are the tracks?
How much RAM does your computer have?

My tracks average 6 min. I have 2 gig RAM.

[kozikowski]

Past the RAM issue (where you will probably run out) is the problem of the actual job. In general, the loudness tools are single ended and have one goal: make everything as loud as possible, and the effect can change significantly with the content.

There is no setting to make this track the same loudness as that one. That's special programming.

Koz

[steve]

There is no setting to make this track the same loudness as that one. That's special programming.

Indeed it is.

By coincidence, I've just been testing a new (experimental) plug-in for this type of job.
Note the word "experimental". Only use this effect on copies of your work, not your irreplaceable originals.

Here's the plug-in (direct link) http://forum.audacityteam.org/download/file.php?id=4685
Here's the forum topic (please post feedback regarding the plug-in here) http://forum.audacityteam.org/viewtopic ... 42&t=63067
Recommended settings: use the defaults.

Instructions for installing the plug-in are in the first post of that topic.

My tracks average 6 min. I have 2 gig RAM.

That should be fine. A 15 minute track at 44.1 kHz, 32-bit float will use about 350 MB of ram during Normalizing with this plug-in.
If you need help using the plug-in, have a read through my posts in that topic first, then if you still have questions please ask in that topic.

[kozikowski]

In a related note: Some time back, someone went to great length to carefully adjust the compressors, clippers, limiters, etc. etc for the very best "invisible" compression and processing. He dismissed Chris as hopelessly crude because of it's slow recovery AGC action -- which it is and does.

I vaguely recall he had some success and I can't find that thread.

Koz

[DVDdoug]

At first, I was thinking of exporting all the tunes to mp3 format and then using MP3Gain...

...I then thought I would export the files to wav for better quality and find a freeware program to normalize the tunes. Again, I'm concerned about the audio quality.

WaveGain uses a similar algorithm on uncompressed WAV files. It adjusts the volume but does not otherwise affect the sound quality.

Or, ReplayGain adjusts the volume at playback-time and can work with any format, but it requires a play that supports it.

The problem is that the audio quality suffers being only 128k.

What? MP3s can go up to 320kbps, and if your files are already MP3, MP3Gain works without re-compressing or otherwise affecting quality.

But whenever possible, you should do all of your editing, mixing, and processing in a lossless format. Then if you want MP3 (or another lossy format), compress once as the final step.

[Lawrie]

Thanks everyone for the input. For now, I've exported all my tracks into wav format and used the "normalized" function to equalize the volume.

What? MP3s can go up to 320kbps.

Thanks for pointing this out. Don't know where my head was at

But whenever possible, you should do all of your editing, mixing, and processing in a lossless format. Then if you want MP3 (or another lossy format), compress once as the final step.

I always do this however, my preference for jamming and practice is to just play the tunes from the original project files. Volume on a tune by tune basis is not an issue so I don't need to export to another format. Volume and quality is for performance purposes.

As an experiment, I'm going to do try out Wavegain and compare the tracks to the Normalized ones at my next practice. I'll report back as to what my fellow musicians think.