Normalizing Music Volume Levels

[luggw1]

I have a fair sized collection of music spread across a wide range of folders on a separate partition where I store my music. I just got my first MP3 player (yep, I'm a little behind the technology curve ) and am using it to play music in my truck. But I have found that the volume level seems to vary widely from the rip of one CD to another. What are others doing to normalize the volume levels of the music collections? What apps do you use? Do you let the app pick an average level and if so, how does it reach across several folders?

Are those questions sufficiently confusing?

Thanks for the help.
Bill Lugg

[Lou]

Re: Normalizing Music Volume Levels

I always call xine with parameter --post volnorm

Volnorm this will normalize audio volume of the file beeing played

[luggw1]

Re: Normalizing Music Volume Levels

From the package descriptions, xine looks like a video processing utility, so from what you're saying it will handle straight audio files also?

Which packages should I install to get what I need to do this? I did a "which xine" and came up empty, so nothing is installed right now.

Thanks for the help.
Bill Lugg

[Lou]

Re: Normalizing Music Volume Levels

It's an all-in-one player like mplayer, so you can play audio as well. You already use the xine library with kde, so all you need now is the player GUI. You can install it via 'aptitude install xine-ui'

Then you change the KMenu entry of xine in Section Multimedia adding '--post volnorm' to the startup line. You can check volnorm is running in xine user interface by right klcikng on the pannel - going to Menu Section Audio > post process > Chain Reaction - and there you should see it.

Another useful post plugin is autocrop - it has nothing to do wih volume normalization, but it comes in handy to crop the black bars of a letterboxed recording, so they don't show during playback.

So my startup command for xine is like this: /usr/bin/xine --post volnorm --post autocrop

I also had a look at amarok since I knew this one is based upon the xine library as well, but I didn't find a way how to enable any kind of audio post plugins from the xine library. - Maybe I'll google around a bit and find out how this is done in amarok. I'd be interested to use it there as well.