Creating normalised playlists in Linux

Question

Is there a media/music player that will allow me to normalise the songs in a playlist?

Should also specify that I'd rather not have to alter the files - a program/plugin where the sound levels are stored as metadata would be preferable.

Answer 1

Amarok can do this for you, with the 'replay_gain' plugin. Look here for more info: http://jopsen.dk/blog/2007/08/volume-normalization-with-amarok/

On top of that, it's an all-round awesome music player ;)

Answer 2

You can normalize the volume of sound files with SoX quite easily. It is dubbed the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs and has a lot of options.

There is also normalize and it is used like this:

normalize -b file1.wav file2.wav file3.wav

I haven't used normalize myself however.

However SoX and normalize work by modifying the audio data. If you don't want that you can try regain. It still modifies the audio files but only the meta data.

Answer 3

replaygain is the way to go as it doesn't alter files, it just add the normalize information as metadata. The only problem left is that you need a player which supports replaygain.