Volume Leveling

[mikeventrella]

After I choose the songs I want to burn, I choose "volume leveling" but when I play the CD later it doesn't seem to have any effect.

 

Many old CDs just were not recorded at the same level as newer ones, and it's jarring to do a mix CD and have to keep adjusting the volume ...

 

I must be missing something; there must be a volume control you can adjust when you do the transitions or something, right?

[d_deweywright]

After I choose the songs I want to burn, I choose "volume leveling" but when I play the CD later it doesn't seem to have any effect.

 

Many old CDs just were not recorded at the same level as newer ones, and it's jarring to do a mix CD and have to keep adjusting the volume ...

 

I must be missing something; there must be a volume control you can adjust when you do the transitions or something, right?

Now, just to get your opinion, which is better, the newer CDs or the older ones?

 

It's actually kind of a trick question. If you look at the waveforms of many new CDs, you'll find that the music has been compressed and the overall level raised to give the impression of a "loudness", and in some cases the music has actually been clipped, causing a loss of detail and an increase in distortion, as well as the compression losing the dynamic range of the original music, and making a mockery of the available dynamic range of the CD format.

 

So, now to get off my soapbox. I honestly don't know how the volume leveling option in ECDC version 6 works, or is supposed to work, since I never installed version 6. I'm certain that there is no way to manually adjust the volume when you create your layout in the transitions or anywhere there. You might be able to do some volume adjustment in Sound Editor. That will be a manual operation, and you'll need to be careful not to increase the volume to where you clip the existing music. In fact, the better approach would be to reduce the volume of the loud songs to match the "quieter" songs. That way you would guarantee that you wouldn't cause any (new) clipping because those quieter songs may actually have peaks that are as loud as they can go.

 

You may also want to look at Goldwave, which is a more sophisticated editor than Sound Editor that comes with ECDC 6. It's pretty reasonably priced (I think there's a limited free version) and has a lot of good options.

 

Hope that helps!