... take the rock recordings and normalize them DOWN to a low percentage, while leaving the classical pieces at 100 percent. Doug, what did your final solution end up being?

I ended up leaving them the way they were, all normalized to 98%. It turned out that I had to take a lot of normalization out of a rock song to get a really noticeable reduction of apparent volume compared to my classical songs, to the point where I was effectively compressing the dynamic range of the song by more than I was comfortable with.

I encoded Rush's "2112" at 100%, 80%, 60%, and 40% normalization and there was amazingly little difference in the apparent listening volume.

The normalization seems more effective at bringing quiet tracks up in volume than in taking loud tracks down.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"