M. Smith wrote:

"Ken Bouchard" wrote in message
et...

how does one go about making all the songs one burns onto a CD-R the same
volume on playback? I sometimes use the "amplify" feature of Cool Edit to
get the amplitude of waveforms up around 0 dB
but after those songs are burned, there sometimes is a noticeable

difference

in playback volume. Is this phenomenon just something you have to live

with

because of the "non-linear" nature of human hearing? I've noticed that of
two songs recorded on CD at the same amplitude, the one with only piano at
the beginning, comes out on playback as lots louder.



Probably no really easy way. You are at the mercy of how the individual
songs were mixed in the first place.

I kinda thought they were songs he had recorded himself. Of course
doctoring like compression can alter the landscape and make some songs
sound louder (that's why it's done!).

FWIW, I think the ideal is to preserve the dynamics of the original
work. Soft songs SHOULD sound softer than loud songs. That said,
I've normalized things that I judged should be similar. And I'm
more concerned with classical than rock 'n roll.


The catch is they can appear to have
the same maximum volume in a program like Cool Edit but if one song is more
highly compressed than another it'll sound louder. The frequency
distribution and other factors will also impact the apparent loudness of a
recording.

So when you are mixing songs from various sources onto a single CDR you are
going to inevitably have some volume differences from cut to cut. It is
possible to edit and adjust, but I've never found it worth the trouble.