I am a teacher and have two video files I like, but they play very quiet audio. Normally, I jack the volume in my classroom way up and it works fine. This year, I am presenting videos online and they really only go as loud as my PC will make them, which is OK if my kids have headphones, but not if they do not.
Anyway, all that aside, I would like to boost/increase the audio on a video file.
I have Handbrake. I know Audacity is free but would have no idea how to increase volume.
I want to be able to say, basically, “double the volume” and it would just double it. If some crackles leak in, that is fine.
My Handbrake program has a “gain” setting I sometimes see. It is set to “0”, but even if I type in a number, I hear no difference. Like, what are the “gain units” I am typing in, so to speak?
If there is any easy way to do this, that’d be great. Online converters are not great because my video files are too large for most to upload.
Apologies if I’m going through some obvious stuff first, I want to be thorough.
In Windows 10, you can right-click on the speaker icon on the bottom left, select “Windows Mixer” and ensure your video playin’ software is cranked up to the max, though this may also readjust some of your other volumes as well. I’d suggest trying this one out privately.
I couldn’t begin to speculate what units Handbrake software uses. Frankly, it probably doesn’t use a meaningful unit, as very little user-oriented software does. It might be a percentile. It might be (relative) decibels, which is what most audio software uses.
IF ALL ELSE FAILS, it’s possible to extract the audio track from a video (I have use something called Virtualdub for this task), process the audio as you see fit, and then reunite the audio with the video once more. Since the video is already on your computer, this should be viable.
Upping the volume on some audio isn’t hard, and if you decide this is the way you have to do it, I can talk you through that part depending on what software you want to use.
Load the soundtrack into Audacity. Click on “Select” to make sure it is selected. Go to the Effect menu, click on Loudness Normalization, change the default value if you want, and click OK.
Alternatively, use the Amplify tool instead of Loudness Normalization (you can make it “double the volume” or just hit OK to max out the volume (peak = 0.0 dB).
Even more alternatively, use the Compressor (leave “Make-Up Gain for 0 dB” checked).
Let’s say your file has a video track and an audio track. The purpose of Handbrake, as I understand it, is to convert the video track, but leave the audio untouched, that is, pass it through to the output file unchanged. That would explain the relative dearth of audio filters and effects, but it sounds like it has at least the possibility of some gain.
If you want to pass through the video but heavily process the audio, that might be easier using some other program than Handbrake. EG: ffmpeg -i input.mkv -filter:a loudnorm output.mkv Or you could do both audio and video editing from the beginning using a free tool like Da Vinci Resolve or Kdenlive or something. It depends on what your raw clips are like and your preferred workflow.
Pass through means that it just copies the audio track from the original video, rather than reencoding it. I thought that being on might be why you can’t get the gain options to actually work.
From what I can tell, the way to do that is to change the codec on the audio tab to something that does not contain the word passthrough. AAC or MP3 would be what I would choose.
This should make it not use passthru, and hopefully make it where the gain options actually do something to the audio.
