Uniform Volume

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Zeeksam
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Dec 13, 2007 3:40 pm

Uniform Volume

Post by Zeeksam »

Hi,

When burning CD's with a variety of songs from a variety of sources, individual volumes can be a pain, i.e one song with normal intensity and the next a "blast of sound." Question:Other than "by ear" adjusting the sound levels, how can I use Amadeus to determine the variances and then create a uniform set of the songs, modified to the same intensities of sound. Thank you for any help with this issue.

CDJonah_alt
Posts: 379
Joined: Thu Mar 15, 2007 3:57 pm

Uniform Volume

Post by CDJonah_alt »

Bottom line, no you have to use your ear as a final arbiter -- a lot
depends on the types of music you are doing, if they are all of the same
type, mechanical processes can work. It also depends on how picky you are.

My procedure.
1. Do statistics on all the songs, save the absolute maximum value
and the average rms value -- best to do it in dB. There are specialized
programs that will frequency-weight these values, but I think the
difference is marginal (and besides I can't remember the name of the
program).
2. Calculate what average value you can choose so that every song has
the same average, none is greater than 0 dB and the largest value is 0 dB
3. Amplify each song so that they meet the criteria of 2.

It won't be perfect -- last time I did a CD, out of 14 tracks, I ended
up modifying I think 2 tracks by 3 dB or so. This was a project where
we were selling the CD so I wanted it to sound pretty good.

I thought I gave a complete explanation with numerical examples a while
back but I can't find it in the forum. It appears as if older posts are
lost.

Chuck

Zeeksam wrote:
Hi,

When burning CD's with a variety of songs from a variety of sources, individual volumes can be a pain, i.e one song with normal intensity and the next a "blast of sound." Question:Other than "by ear" adjusting the sound levels, how can I use Amadeus to determine the variances and then create a uniform set of the songs, modified to the same intensities of sound. Thank you for any help with this issue.




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Charles D. Jonah CDJonah@anl.gov
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Chemistry Division
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, IL 60439



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CDJonah_alt
Posts: 379
Joined: Thu Mar 15, 2007 3:57 pm

Uniform Volume

Post by CDJonah_alt »

The program is Audio Leak -- a free version is available -- it measures
Leq. On the examples that I tested, I think the normalization would
have been the same within a dB whether I used average values or Leq values.

Chuck

Charles Jonah wrote:
Bottom line, no you have to use your ear as a final arbiter -- a lot
depends on the types of music you are doing, if they are all of the
same type, mechanical processes can work. It also depends on how
picky you are.

My procedure.
1. Do statistics on all the songs, save the absolute maximum value
and the average rms value -- best to do it in dB. There are
specialized programs that will frequency-weight these values, but I
think the difference is marginal (and besides I can't remember the
name of the program).
2. Calculate what average value you can choose so that every song
has the same average, none is greater than 0 dB and the largest value
is 0 dB
3. Amplify each song so that they meet the criteria of 2.

It won't be perfect -- last time I did a CD, out of 14 tracks, I ended
up modifying I think 2 tracks by 3 dB or so. This was a project where
we were selling the CD so I wanted it to sound pretty good.

I thought I gave a complete explanation with numerical examples a
while back but I can't find it in the forum. It appears as if older
posts are lost.

Chuck

Zeeksam wrote:
Hi,

When burning CD's with a variety of songs from a variety of sources,
individual volumes can be a pain, i.e one song with normal intensity
and the next a "blast of sound." Question:Other than "by ear"
adjusting the sound levels, how can I use Amadeus to determine the
variances and then create a uniform set of the songs, modified to the
same intensities of sound. Thank you for any help with this issue.




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Amadeus forum mailing list
Unsubscribe / change settings at
http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/forum_list
--
Charles D. Jonah CDJonah@anl.gov
630-252-3471
Chemistry Division
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, IL 60439



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Gerard Bik
Posts: 353
Joined: Fri Nov 10, 2006 9:04 pm

Uniform Volume

Post by Gerard Bik »

I thought I gave a complete explanation with numerical examples a while back but I can't find it in the forum. It appears as if older posts are lost.

Chuck
You were looking for this one, Chuck? I archived it.

This has been a recurring theme on this discussion group and I thought I
would describe my most recent experiment.

I got a small program "audio leak", which basically will very quickly
calculate the peak value of a track and the "A weighted average" as well
as the "unweighted average". As I understand it, the theory is that one
makes the A-avg the same for all tracks. I tried this for a CD that
contained one spoken voice track, some piano tracks -- without a great
deal of dynamic range -- and some vocal-piano tracks, with a lot of
dynamic range.

The resulting CD using that program to decide how to set things (set of
course in Amadeus) was definitely better than using the peak values and
for the piano and voice-piano tracks it would have been acceptable. I
ended up taking the the spoken voice track down about 4.5 dB. I took
most of the piano tracks down about 2 dB.

Of course, some of my sentiments may be because I am primarily a vocal
person. I would say that the Audio Leak was definitely worth the money
(and the time) because it got me in the right ballpark very quickly.

Chuck

Procedure --
I ranAudio Leak on each file and put the peak and a-weighed value in a
spread sheet. I then figured out how much to amplify each one (using
dB) so that all had a constant dB-A value and the largest peak value was
-0.1.
I burned a CD, listened to it on a decent sound system and then listened
to adjacent tracks where I wasn't happy on Amadeus and moved the
relevant tracks down.
Burning the CD might not be necessary, but it let me listen to things in
a normal way, and also let me decide how I wanted to adjust the
intertrack times.

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heaton
Posts: 52
Joined: Fri Nov 10, 2006 6:18 pm

Uniform Volume

Post by heaton »

Hi,

When burning CD's with a variety of songs from a variety of sources,
individual volumes can be a pain, i.e one song with normal intensity
and the next a "blast of sound." Question:Other than "by ear"
adjusting the sound levels, how can I use Amadeus to determine the
variances and then create a uniform set of the songs, modified to
the same intensities of sound. Thank you for any help with this
issue.
This is not an Amadeus solution, but if you have Toast 8 Titanium,
you can drag your files into Toast to burn your CD, select all tunes,
go to the Disc menu, apply "Normalize track" (which actually
normalizes all tracks, in relation to each other), and then burn the
CD.

I do not know how this method compares with the more sophisticated
suggestions you have received, but it works well enough for me.

I have to burn CDs with Toast because for some reason the "Burn to
CD..." function in Amadeus does not work for me. (Nor can I burn CDs
from iTunes.)
CP
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Zeeksam
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Dec 13, 2007 3:40 pm

Uniform Volume

Post by Zeeksam »

Thank you everyone for their time and for the great information. Definitely a learning curve there for me. I ended up analyzing each song with Amadeus Pro (Waveform Statistics), and then raising or lowering the db level for each song by utilizing and applying amplify effects + or - db's to reach a uniform average. A bit laborious to say the least, but a better CD album in the end. In a perfect world I'd purchase Toast Titanium as suggested but.... a little expensive just now. Regards.

CDJonah_alt
Posts: 379
Joined: Thu Mar 15, 2007 3:57 pm

Uniform Volume

Post by CDJonah_alt »

I haven't tried Toast for that -- I don't know exactly what it does.
Looking at the Roxio website, I suspect that what it does is just
normalize every track to a fixed maximum value. You can do this
relatively simply (normalize every track to the same maximum) using AIi
or AP. This approach will work well if all the music is of the same
type and doesn't have extreme dynamic ranges. I ran into problems with
this simple approach when I was recording a vocal album with Vivaldi and
Mozart on the same CD. The Vivaldi was basicaly all at the same level,
so that if it was normalized to the same peak value as the Mozart, it
felt like the Vivaldi was hitting you over the head.

Chuck

Zeeksam wrote:
Thank you everyone for their time and for the great information. Definitely a learning curve there for me. I ended up analyzing each song with Amadeus Pro (Waveform Statistics), and then raising or lowering the db level for each song by utilizing and applying amplify effects + or - db's to reach a uniform average. A bit laborious to say the least, but a better CD album in the end. In a perfect world I'd purchase Toast Titanium as suggested but.... a little expensive just now. Regards.




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