Burning Programs

As I've mentioned a few times now, I'm putting together my own "Sounds Of The Seventies" style compilations, using Whitburn's Pop Annual as a source. I'm making good progress, but have some reservations with volume variances between source discs. I was hoping someone might have some advice on a way of leveling out the sound.

I'm using Roxio's Easy CD And DVD Creator 6, which offers a "volume leveling" feature that helps. Still, there are some discs that it doesn't seem to work on. I've gone into the sound editor, but the only volume level I can find there is for recording from other sources (ala a turntable.)

Can anyone recommend either a feature I'm missing in Creator, or another burning program that would help me with this problem?

aaronk wrote: I never use burning programs to level the sound. I always use my audio editing software (Cool Edit Pro) and change the levels by ear.

Agreed. I use Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit) to make volume adjustments. I always convert the file to 32 bit for volume processing, and use the "Normalize" feature to set the peak volume just under 100%.

When I started getting into home audio restoration 4 years ago, I quickly discovered that the processing options in Roxio (e.g. volume leveling, click/pop eliminator) were quite poor. That's what lead me to Cool Edit (and to countless hours of tinkering & declicking vinyl dubs).

aaronk wrote: One reason that "volume leveling" doesn't work is because it is designed to find the wave's digital peak and change the volume based on that. A song that has been heavily compressed with "hard limiting" may have the same digital peaks as another song that has not been compressed, but it will be much louder than the latter.

Most quality programs will do both peak and RMS normalization. So, if you use RMS, it will work.

One method I also use is with the digital meters on the software. I pick a point, say, -9. Then, I visually adjust the songs so that they average at that point. This method works well.

Having bought an mp3 player recently, and keeping it on "random play", I find that there's just going to be some volume fluctuations no matter what I do. The player does have a feature to even out the sound. But it flattens it down so much, I just don't like the sound of it, so I don't use the feature. Every song I put in this player came from my CDR compilations of favorite songs (over 3500 songs), and these CDRs were already mastered by me. As someone pointed out, normalizing each song on a CDR isn't enough ... because of compression, or a soft song with one loud drum crash, etc. So I made each CDR to be at least volume-controlled for the whole CDR, in other words, no dramatic volume changes from song to song (or throughout the entire CDR). However, when you put all the songs into an mp3 player and choose random, when it goes from, say, a '70s song to a '00s song, BOOM the sound jumps up so loud because most current songs (and even late '90s songs) are just compressed so much.

So, though I could go through 3500 songs again and compress old songs and uncompress new songs to balance all 3500 songs out, I opted for the other choice, which is to just adjust the volume button when needed.

Edited by EdisonLite