I haven't had a chance to look at the code you posted before. I downloaded it to my hard disk, and it's on my "to do" list...

Of course we'd be interested in it. And I'll tell you what: If you could come up with a simple Windows front-end to select (or group select) MP3 file(s) and batch-process their gain fields, you could shareware-sell that puppy over the internet. There would be a big demand for such a thing.

One interesting issue:

I've been doing a little experimenting, and I've discovered that peak-detection normalization is not going to work "automatically", since many of the albums that I consider "quiet" are actually already peak-normalized. It's just that newer albums are compressed more, with the quiet bits being closer to the peaks. If you increase the global gain on a track that is already normalized, you will clip the peaks just a little bit. For the albums that I want to increase, though, I don't think the effect would be noticeable. If you could come up with a simple test program, I have a few tracks in mind that I could try it on (ones that sound VERY quiet overall except for a couple of very large peaks) and see if it's a viable to do that.

The other option is to leave the old albums unchanged, and only reduce the global gain on the newer albums. That would have the same net effect, but without the peak clipping.



Tony Fabris
Empeg #144