Recently I used MP3Gain in an attempt to get all the mp3s in my audio collection to be as close to the recommended 89.0 dB as possible before putting playlists together and/or burning them to CD. The best I’ve been able to achieve is a range of 88.2 to 89.8 dB, which isn’t bad but is far from ideal because I can already see that I’ll still be needing to raise or lower the volume on various tracks. Some of the 88.2 dB tracks are actually much louder than the 89.8 dB tracks, which makes no sense to me as they are 1.6 dB softer! Is there any further process I can use to adjust all these tracks to the (at-least-almost) exact same volume so I can avoid my constant battle with the volume knob? I can’t be alone in my frustration. What do other people do? I understand that record companies and radio stations use some sort of expensive compression software to deal with this problem, but what does the average audiophile do to combat this? I’d like to simply ENJOY my music collection–not go to war with it! Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Hi plutosun,
I’m assuming you are using Adobe Audition here so have a look at this:-
Batch Convert Many Audio Files to Equal Volume Levels - YouTube.
Be careful with your LUFS value as -16 might be a little too high and cause your music files to clip once processed. Mike was dealing with vocals in the video and not full bandwidth audio. Make sure you use copies of your audio files and not your originals when doing this. Keep the originals safe!
Once you have your newly re-calibrated audio files you might find that a few of them still sound louder even though they read back the same LUFS value as the others. This is partly due to psychoacoustics and some other factors but you should be in the ball park using LUFS. You can always tweak the LUFS for those files that still sound louder if necessary.
Enjoy your music collection…
IanT.