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Undertoad · 07-09-2003, 11:03 AM

There is normalization, which is an attempt to set volume levels at roughly the same place. The effect of this is to force all songs to roughly the same volume level no matter what. This is a nice idea for some purposes, but I don't use it at all myself. Reasons:

- I prefer to respect the original mastering engineer's decisions because I think they may know than me.

- Especially in an album context, the volume levels are part of the original content and should be preserved for artistic reasons.

- It may screw up the original. By converting to mp3 (or OGG, WMA, AAC etc), we are already reducing the quality of the sound. I don't know how "lossy" normalization is, and buggy code can mess it up anyway.

07-09-2003, 11:03 AM	#7
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	There is normalization, which is an attempt to set volume levels at roughly the same place. The effect of this is to force all songs to roughly the same volume level no matter what. This is a nice idea for some purposes, but I don't use it at all myself. Reasons: - I prefer to respect the original mastering engineer's decisions because I think they may know than me. - Especially in an album context, the volume levels are part of the original content and should be preserved for artistic reasons. - It may screw up the original. By converting to mp3 (or OGG, WMA, AAC etc), we are already reducing the quality of the sound. I don't know how "lossy" normalization is, and buggy code can mess it up anyway.