Stooopid Question

[jwoo10]

This may have already been addressed here (if soI appologise)...

BUT.... I'm wondering if anyone knows of a way (or what I have to do)... to get all of the mastered final song tracks I have from several different artists that I've collabbed with... to be at the same volume level when I want to burn them to a cd...

Some of them now are real soft and some are very loud...

what's the trick???

Help?

[Davidinoz]

The trick is compression. You use a mastering limiter such as Waves L2 to raise the average sound level without clipping the peaks. This will also change the sound of the song, sometimes for better. If you over do it it sounds like crap. Your other option is to just send all your songs to CD for him to master

[jeff]

Nero has an option to standardize song levels when burning.

Not sure if its wrecking the sound or not. Sounds ok to me. But then I don't have the keen ear that others have.

Jeff

[CosmicDolphin]

Nero has an option to standardize song levels when burning.

Not sure if its wrecking the sound or not. Sounds ok to me. But then I don't have the keen ear that others have.

Jeff

That'll probably just normalize them all, which is different from having them all sound the same volume.

Jwoo, the quiet ones could probably use mastering, like Davidinoz says using things like compression to level them all up, it's much easier if you have an unmastered version of each song so you can get them all sounding similar. 

CD

[NickT]

john,

I don't think normalization will work here. Most of the songs that come from this board have gone through some sort of limiter. Some hard, some soft, But They will all have reached 0db at some point in the song. Normalization will only bring the loudest part of a song to 0 bd. But if you already have say one kick at 0db, nothing happens.

You can put a limiter on the soft songs and and apply compression that wil make them louder. be careful not to destroy the song!

http://www.harmony-central.com/Effects/Articles/Compression/

Nick

[jwoo10]

Thank you guys.. got some looking and reading and experimenting to do I suppose.

I was wondering if there is some sort of measuring plug/device/tool I can use that will allow me to compare them all so I know what their vol levels will be before I burn them down.. or is it just hit and miss using the 0 db test???

[CosmicDolphin]

All the wave editing programs will show you the peak and average level of the songs, Wavelab and the like, so will Har-Bal.

In the old days it was just a sound meter from Radio Shack and your ears. 

CD

[jwoo10]

In the old days it was just a sound meter from Radio Shack and your ears.

Thats what I was afraid of.. Thank folks!

[Gerk]

If you want a quick/easy/hacky way to do it and have iTunes ... add all the songs to a playlist in iTunes and make sure that you've enabled "Sound Check" in the iTunes preferences before you burn the audio CD ... it does it's own level comparison and tries to match up the sound levels in all the tracks.  Not sure exactly what it does to be honest, but it does a semi decent job of things if you're not looking for re-mastering quality ...

Mark