Improving sound quality on mp3's

[Tobiasly]

Originally posted by Undertoad
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.

A wonderful program I use to normalize MP3's is MP3Gain. It uses a feature of the MP3 standard that lets a certain gain in increments of 1.5 dB to be specified in the header. This means you can adjust it without affecting the actual music data, and can set it back later so that the file is exactly the same as it was at first.

It scans the entire track to determine its overall loudness, then adjusts the header accordingly. You can also specify that it adjusts a group of files without affecting their relative volume to each other, for cases where some songs on an album are supposed to be quiet.

I always give my MP3's a run through this program to avoid having to adjust the volume on my portable player each time a new track comes on.