Everyone's making good points, but you're all addressing the volume of it
while it's in the digital realm. When audio is played through a sound
system and you're hearing it through speakers there will still be a
perceived volume change per song. You can test this theory by taking a few
songs that are all normalized to 0dB and transer them to a cassette tape.
Set the record level on the cassette tape as hot as you can get it, using
the parts of the file that are hitting 0dB. Now, hit record and transfer
all songs without adjusting the record volume on the cassette tape. You
will have areas that record louder than you set it it. Some of this is
because certain frequencies are perceived lounder than others. Bass
frequencies move more air. So, songs with more bass register as "louder" to
the computer and the song will be normalized accordingly. If you have a
song with no bass and normalize it, it will seem much louder then the one
with heavy bass.

"Geoff Wood" -nospam wrote in message
...

"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

Vanilla (peak) normalisation will bring the loudest pount of any track (if
done on a per-track basis) to the same loudness. However different sytles
of music have very different distributions of energy, and may sound very
different in apparent level.

Using RMS normalisation to a given value 9say, -14dB) will make everything
sound pretty much as loud as everything else, but you need to watch for
clipping if your nrmalise tool doesn't check in advance and scale the
whole
thing. A loudnes maximiser plugin (like Waves L1,2 or Sonic Foundry
WaveHammer, and others) pretty much does the whole caboodle.

However there are artistc reasons why all music shouldn't be 'blanded' to
the same average level, which may not concern you ....

geoff