What's a good piece of (free) software for normalising sound levels across a set of MP3s? I don't need to apply effects or anything fancy, just raise the volume on quiet files and lower it on loud ones.

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What operating system? – emddudley Jul 23 '09 at 16:12
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7 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Audacity

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The Audacity documentation is at: audacity.sourceforge.net/help/documentation – emddudley Jul 23 '09 at 16:11
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Will Audacity do batch jobs? – mandroid Jul 23 '09 at 17:48
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audacity is rather cumbersome for the above stated tasks... I could not recommend it for this job. It works wonders for a myriad of other tasks however. – ericslaw Aug 1 '09 at 21:08
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MP3Gain

MP3Gain does not just do peak normalization, as many normalizers do. Instead, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear. Also, the changes MP3Gain makes are completely lossless. There is no quality lost in the change because the program adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding.

Though I think Audacity is more reknown

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+1 mp3gain is sooo simple to use – Nifle Jul 23 '09 at 22:30
MP3Gain is great for this use, but I have to add that changes made by it are NOT all the time loseless. Depending on the change in dB you are asking for, there is a loss, the program warns you about it (that's when the gain number displays in red). – Gnoupi Aug 9 '09 at 16:13
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Audacity is great, but you might also want to check out Levelator.

Levelator adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file and it runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

I hope this helps.

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On Windows, I do it within my music player, foobar2000.

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If a command line utility is ok, I'd definitely recommend normalize.

I especially appreciate the batch mode with which you can normalise an album while preserving the relative volume levels of the tracks.

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Audiograbber will normalize the volume level of audio. It does a nice job of it.

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mediamonkey will set replay-gain idv3 fields of your mp3 files quite nicely.
highlight the file(s) and right-click [Analyze Volume] to set the replay-gain fields.
I think it can do it automatically as well (config option someplace)

lifehacker also has a discussion about this:
http://lifehacker.com/software/mp3/ask-the-readers-best-method-of-mp3-volume-leveling-225651.php#comments

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