Easily Adjusting Volume on Thousands of MP3 Files

My mum loves The Beatles! I remembered few years ago she told me that and I, being the filial son, immediately went looking for The Beatles MP3s so I can burn her a copy for her to listen when she is working in her office or when she’s driving. Since both her office and car CD player is able to play MP3 files, I don’t need to convert them to audio format. Just download and burn. How easy…

After a week of listening to The Beatles MP3, mum called me and told me that some of the song’s volume is very high. Whenever it reaches that song, she’ll have to run the to player to lower down the volume and when that song is over, the next song volume is a little low and he again have to run to the player to turn up the volume.

My mistake was, I totally forgotten to adjust the volumes of the downloaded MP3. All MP3 has different volumes because it is being ripped by different people using different software and settings. So what I need is a tool that can help me easily adjust the volume on many MP3 files.

Actually I’ve researched on this topic before because one of my friend who is a Disc Jockey (DJ), needs to adjust the volume of all his remixes. That way, he don’t need to adjust the volume on his mixer so often. I found a few MP3 normalizers but it didn’t do a good job because some of his MP3 becomes distorted after normalizing it.

Now I found a better tool which is FREE and it is able to analyze and adjusts mp3 files so that they have the same volume. MP3Gain does not just do peak normalization, as many normalizers do. Instead, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear. Also, the changes MP3Gain makes are completely lossless. There is no quality lost in the change because the program adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding.

You can easily adjust volumes on thousands of MP3 files by using it’s built-in batch processing option that allow you to process an entire folder at once. Do take note that MP3Gain operates in two modes, Track and Album:

Track mode volume-corrects a mix of unrelated songs to a selected level. MP3Gain calculates the volume level for each song individually. It then corrects each song to make its volume level match the Target Volume. For example, if you have 3 songs that have volume levels of 86, 91 and 89 dB and you use Track Gain to convert them to a Target Volume of 92 dB, they will all be at approximately 92 dB.

Album mode volume-corrects a collection of related songs (as they would appear on a CD, or “album”) relative to other collections of songs. Applying Album gain is like adjusting the volume knob once for each CD you put in your CD player. The overall volume of the album is adjusted to the Target Volume, but the volume differences between the mp3s in the album are preserved. For example, if you have 3 songs that have volume levels of 86, 91 and 89 dB, then the overall volume of this “album” will probably be around 89 dB. If the Target Volume is set to 92 dB, then when you apply Album Gain MP3Gain will increase the volume of each of these songs by +3 dB.

With Album mode, you want some songs to be noticeably quieter than other songs, just like they are on an album. If you’re playing a classical CD, you expect the track with the flute solo to be quieter than the track with the big full-orchestra finale. Album mode allows you to correct an entire album while keeping each song’s volume level relative to the other songs.

Although MP3Gain might look easy to use but it’s actually quite technical. I am no sound man and I don’t really understand much from the MP3Gain help file. Perhaps for DJs, sound man and professional sound editor could understand better and able to help them configure MP3Gain according to their needs.

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