Normalize volume on MP3 audio files using MP3Gain

Posted on December 2, 2008 at 5:45 am

Do you have a large MP3 music collection that you either downloaded off the Internet or ripped from CD? If you do, you probably noticed that many songs are recorded at different bitrates and are either really loud or really low compared to a normal MP3 recording.

This is very annoying because if you are listening to a random selection of music, you have to constantly adjust your speakers either up or down because of the variation in sound level between the MP3 files. So can anything do done?

MP3Gain is a great freeware program that will analyze and adjust a collection of MP3 files so that they all have the same volume! This is one of my favorite freeware programs because I can now listen to all my music without worrying about one song blowing out my speakers.

Note that MP3Gain can adjust how loud each song sounds without any quality loss. The program has two modes, Track and Album. Track mode will correct the volume on a group of unrelated songs to a particular target volume that you specify. It corrects each song individually.

Album mode corrects a collections of related songs (like a group of songs on a CD album) relative to other collections of songs. Applying the Album gain is like adjusting the volume knob once for each CD you play in your CD player. The overall volume of the album is adjusted, but the volume difference between songs in the album are preserved.

If you are a music lover, this probably all makes sense, otherwise it may not. Either way, if you have lots of albums in your collection, then use Album gain, otherwise just use Track gain if there are lots of unrelated songs in your MP3 collection.

To get started, add some files or folders where all of your MP3 files are located.

Once all the files are in the list box, you need to let MP3Gain analyze them so that it can determine how to adjust the files. From the Analysis menu, you can choose Track Analysis, Album Analysis, or Max No-Clip Analysis. Track and Album analysis are like what we talked about before, either a single file or a group of files.

The program will give you some basic information about the files, such as the volume, track gain, and more.

Finally, once the analysis is complete, you can adjust the actual volume (gain) of all the MP3 files. Again, you can choose from Album gain or Track gain. Make sure to first set the target volume to the desired value. By default it is set at 89 dB. Now from the Modify Gain menu, choose the gain you want to use to normalize the volume of all the MP3 files.

And that’s it! Now all of your MP3 files will have the same volume across the board! Have fun listening to your music!

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One Response to “Normalize volume on MP3 audio files using MP3Gain”

3 ways to change bitrate on MP3 files Says:

[...] to change the bitrate on your MP3 files? Previously, I wrote about how you could normalize the audio level of your audio files using a free program called MP3Gain, which will change the bitrate for all files to [...]
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:23 am