Normalizing Music?

Beans asks: "I have a couple classical music CD's which I listen to at work, and use for putting the baby to sleep. I can never find the correct volume, I can't hear soft spots, so I turn it up, only to have a rising crescendo rouse the baby, or at work, have co-workers glace over. What is a good way to normalize them (read on for what I mean by normalize)? All of the normalizing software I have seen uses the entire song for the window of normalzing. Basically makes determines a static value required to get the average volume of the song to the user defined level, then applies that value to the entire song. What I need is something that normalizes over a sliding window, or say 5 seconds, or whatever. In effect making soft spots louder, and crescendo's quieter. Not the way the music was intended to be heard, but perfect for music-at-work, or putting kids to sleep. Does anyone know of any software that does this? On a side note, I work for a Seismic processing company, and we do stuff like this all the time on Seismic waves, not sound waves. If I can't find any canned software to do this, I may modify some of our code to work with WAV files, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel."

Comments

WMP9 or 10

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

They both have a volume equalizer option.

Night Mode

[Wiwi Jumbo]

On my nForce 2 motherboard, the sound applet has a "Night Mode" which um... "compresses" the sound so you don't have to turn it up as loud to hear the soft notes...

It's a pretty niffty feature to have, but I've never seen it anywhere else that I can think of...

Many Receivers & DVD Players have this..

[cybrthng]

Some home theater receivers and tv's have "Night Mode" which is used to do this. Feature is great in that you don't have to crank it to hear all of the dynamic ranges of a movie thus not loosing too much when you watch at lower volumes. (perfect for those with kids..)

I think even my DVD player does this.

foobar2000 ReplayGain

[Black Acid]

Not all CDs sound equally loud. The perceived loudness of mp3s is even more variable. Whilst different musical moods require that some tracks should sound louder than others, the loudness of a given CD has more to do with the year of issue or the whim of the producer than the intended emotional effect. If we add to this chaos the inconsistent quality of mp3 encoding, it's no wonder that a random play through your music collection can have you leaping for the volume control every other track. As the website says, The Replay Gain proposal sets out a simple way of calculating and representing the ideal replay gain for every track and album.

The foobar2000 audio player includes built-in support for ReplayGain. MP3 Gain was mentioned in another thread, for the differences, see Difference between Mp3gain and Replaygain.