Suppose you have an MP3 file with some song which plays at a lower or higher volume than most of your other songs, which is jarring when you have it in a playlist with some other music. You can obviously just adjust the volume in your computer or media player every time that song goes on and again when another song comes on, but it’s a pain in the neck.
So the question is: is there some simple way to permanently modify the MP3 file so that it will play it at a higher/lower volume?
MP3Gain will do it.
The free version of MediaMonkey will also do this. It will even take a group of MP3 files and normalize them in relation to each other so they play at similar (not identical) volumes.
Audacity can also increase the volume.
Another vote for MP3Gain.
It’s a command line app, so if that’s the way you like to do things, it’s pretty neat.
At one time I had it set up with a cron job and a script that would find new albums and normalize all files within the folder relative to each other, as new folders appeared.
I don’t believe it’s re-encoding anything; it’s simply tweaking a gain setting in the MP3 header that is applied to the file content.
I was curious about this so checked Wikipedia - MP3Gain and you are correct, the utility applies the ReplayGain loudness determination algorithm and then sets the ReplayGain parameter, as well as saving the original value if present.
Give yourself one Ignorance Fought token…
Yes, but I think this requires that whatever MP3 or media player you are using recognizes and properly acts upon this header. (Some media players can support this, but you may need to enable this support in the preferences.)
You can do it easily in iTunes.
There is a command-line version, but the normal Windows version runs in a window.
I’ve used MP3Gain for decades to balance my entire MP3 collection, and I’ve never run across an MP3 player that didn’t recognize and support this by default.
I don’t believe you. The ReplayGain spec wasn’t even published until 2001, and the earliest release of MP3Gain I can find is from 2002. Support way back then was extremely spotty across software players, and nonexistent for hardware players. If you’ve never run across an MP3 player that didn’t support ReplayGain by default, then (at least in the first few years or so of its existence) you must have had the luck of choosing only the very early adopters. Even today it is not unusual to find people online bitching about certain media players or devices (car stereos, etc.) not supporting ReplayGain.
nm, this isn’t the Pit.
There are many ways to do it. . .but most involve some additional software. If you’re comfortable doing that it’s easy.