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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."

3 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Creative Nomad by BoomerSooner · · Score: 0, Troll

    My MP3 Player does this.

    Better than an iPod for way less (plus the battery is exchangeable).

  2. Re:Dynamic Compression with Audacity by n1ywb · · Score: 0, Troll

    audacity's compressor plugin is junk.

    --
    -73, de n1ywb
    www.n1ywb.com
  3. Re:WMP9 or 10 by SupremeTaco · · Score: 0, Troll

    Could you please speak up? I can't hear you OVER THIS LOUD TV COMMERCIAL!!!

    --
    You have a constitutionally protected right to be wrong, and I the right to ignore you.