Well guess what. They're probably already normalized, and the reason they sound like they're all at different volume levels has nothing whatsoever to do with normalization. Most CD's that you buy are already normalized, and they still sound like they're at different volume levels..

The entire CD is scaled so that the loudest instant of the loudest track is just shy of clipping. That means if you're listening to the Brandenburg Concerto with cannon fire, the bulk of the music will be far below the peak. On the other hand, if you're listening to a CD full of harpsichord solos, the bulk of the music is just about as loud as the peak. Therefore if you switch from one track to the other, the harpsichord track will sound much louder (not what you want).

So how do you keep eight strings of a harpsichord from being as loud as a twenty-one gun salute? Well compressing amplitude will help somewhat, but as sc400 said, that's not ideal. What you need is a line in the info file (ending with a 1) associated with each mp3 file (ending with a 0) that gives a volume offset in dB. This would make song sound XdB softer than what you currently have the volume set to. If you individually renormalize each track on a CD you would want to compensate the offset number accordingly so when played, every track had the same relative volume as the recording engineer intended. That way you would maximize the noise performance of the crappy DACs on the Philips DSP (next time use Analog Devices) and place more burden on the variable gain Burr-Brown amps (almost as good as Analog Devices). All quiet tracks would sound better! You could set the offset before renormalization by ear (once for every CD), but that would be a huge pain in the @ss for a big collection. I doubt you could even do it consistently unless you were very careful. A much easier way would be to run a rms detector across every album and set the offsets for that album so that every album was, on average the same loudness. Then sc400 can sit in his quiet Lexus with his empeg on full random, and rarely adjust the volume levels. If "rarely" wasn't good enough you could manually adjust the offset levels for albums that you want to be quiet.

-jim <MkII:080000260 18G blue>