Loudness Normalization: Making Your Music Sound Balanced

Free Download Mp4Gain

Loudness Normalization: Making Your Music Sound Balanced

Have you ever noticed that some songs are louder than others? Sometimes, you have to turn up the volume to hear a soft song, and then turn it down again when a loud song comes on. This can be annoying, but it’s actually a problem that can be solved with something called “loudness normalization.”

What is Loudness Normalization?

Loudness normalization is a process that evens out the volume of different songs or audio tracks. It makes sure that they all have a similar volume level, so you don’t have to adjust your volume settings constantly. It’s a common technique used in the music industry, where songs from different sources need to be combined into one album or playlist.

Why is Loudness Normalization Important?

There are a few reasons why loudness normalization is important:

Consistency: When all of your songs are at a similar volume level, you can listen to your music without having to adjust the volume constantly. This makes for a better listening experience.
Preventing Damage to Your Ears: If a song suddenly plays at a much louder volume, it can be harmful to your ears. Loudness normalization prevents this by keeping the volume level consistent.
Making Your Music Sound Better: By evening out the volume levels, you can hear all the details in your music. This is especially important when listening to music with headphones, where imbalances in volume can be even more noticeable.

How is Loudness Normalization Done?

Loudness normalization can be done manually by adjusting the volume levels of each individual song, but this is time-consuming and can be difficult to get right. Instead, many people use software that can automatically adjust the volume levels for them. This software analyzes the audio file and adjusts the volume levels so that they are all similar.

One popular software that can do this is Mp4Gain. It’s easy to use and can normalize the volume levels of many different audio file formats. Mp4Gain analyzes the loudness of each audio file and then adjusts the volume levels to make them all similar. This can be done with just a few clicks of a button.

Conclusion

Loudness normalization is an important technique for anyone who wants to listen to music without constantly adjusting the volume. It ensures consistency and can make your music sound better. If you want to easily normalize the volume levels of your audio files, then Mp4Gain is the best solution for you.

Free Download Mp4Gain

Mp4Gain Main Window

Mp4Gain Features

Free Download Mp4Gain

Let’s talk about “musical dynamics” and “musical loudness” Part 2

The two brief examples above are to tell you that frequency content, sound pressure, and sound duration will affect people’s perception of sound volume.

That is why it is said that “loudness tends to human subjective perception”.

Since the volume is the subjective perception of people, how to quantify it?

To quantify “loudness”, the first thing you need to look at is the relationship between the frequency and the loudness of the human ear. There are two pictures below, you can read them carefully for reference:

Looking at the two images above, you will clearly see that the human ear and the human brain are not an organ that flattens the receiving frequency. It will not develop here. For the basis of loudness quantization, see the second image, there is a unit called “fon”. The phon unit is an attempt to quantize loudness. We take a 1kHz signal as an example, and it can be perceived at a volume of 40dB at 1kHz, so it is 40phon. Based on this, another unit is called a sone, 1 sone = 40phon. Both are units that attempt to quantify volume.

The international organization will be the ITU and the EBU…etc. The characteristics of the human ear, the psychoacoustics of the human brain, etc., all factors that affect loudness perception are considered together, and these factors are calculated through complicated mathematical calculations Define and standardize the reasonable loudness range for ” sound reproduction” only after statistically significant results have been obtained. Those interested can search: “ITU-R 1770 and ITU-R 1771”.

Should the rules be followed?

Of course continue! In fact, there is such a problem in Taiwan. Not to mention music, only the fourth channel and MOD, the sound level of each channel is different! The scariest thing is switching from the movie station to the shopping channel and often still being scared by the sudden volume of the shopping channel. Even radio shows have this kind of situation.

Here, you can go to Google again: “Volume War Loudness War”. All this is commonplace. This article is mainly to introduce the definition and specification of loudness.

Effects of loudness specifications

Although ITU, EBU, ISO, ANSI and other organizations have introduced loudness specifications, major music and video streaming platforms still have their own standards. However, the standards of the main platforms will continue to be around the specifications, and there will be no big or outside. When it comes to the audiovisual industry, it will generally affect these things:

Music streaming platforms: Records must meet loudness specifications at time of release

Video streaming platforms: Loudness specifications must be met when movies are released

Let’s talk about “musical dynamics” and “musical sonority”

Where does the music we listen to come from?

Before we talk about it, it is necessary to quickly talk about the disc creation process. In principle, it can be divided into three parts: the initial stage, the intermediate stage and the later stage.

First stage: compose, arrange

Middle term: recording, mixing

Post: post mastering, distribution, marketing

Whether a piece of music is good or not can be determined at the initial stage of the arrangement. Then there is the recording. The recording process can be finding real musicians to record the sound of real instruments, or completing the melody required by the arrangement through software instruments. Then find a singer or singers to sing… and so on. This process is called recording.

The “balance” of a song is not only achieving the balance of the melody in the arrangement, on the other hand, it is leaning on the mix to make the recorded elements a harmony in listening and frequency, it is also usually necessary to coordinate It depends on where the track goes, or what the producer wants. After all, the purpose of a song or album is to become a commercial release, and the post-production and embellishment processes that need to be done are necessary.

Usually the post-mastering process will be done last. After the entire album’s timbre direction, volume adjustment and minor flaws etc. are fixed, the final mastering will be uploaded according to the loudness specifications required by each streaming platform. .

Quantify the volume and intensity of what we hear

Sometimes people equate loudness with loudness. Actually the two are different. They are different and at the same time influence each other.

Loudness can be quantified, in simple terms, it is our most used “decibel dB”. Volume, on the other hand, tends to be subjectively perceived by people. how to say? Different 75-decibel musical signals are sent out at a time, and everyone has different feelings about its loudness and volume.

Because loudness is related to three things: frequency content, duration, and sound pressure.

We played a 1000 Hz test signal for three minutes at a sound pressure of 80 decibels. Your perception of the volume of this signal will be very different from playing it for 10 seconds or 30 seconds.

Let us take two singers as an example, one of them has a more evident timbre in the mid-high frequency band, and the other has a more evident mid-low frequency band, they sing the same song, and they sing with the same key and similar sound pressure, generally in the mid-high frequency band. The sound of the sound will feel stronger.

Loudness normalization

When you have a lot of mp3 files, you often look for loudness normalization.

What usually happens is that we have mp3s (although Mp4Gain can do Loudness normalization of many other audio and video formats!!) that have been created with different settings, for example different bit rates… which causes them to have a loudness different and that is annoying to the ear.

Many times we have been collecting mp3s from different sources, finding one here and another there and over time we have managed to have a good collection that is worth thinking about, but we have a problem: the loudness differs between different music or video files.

And this has generated that we desperately need to find a solution.

Mp4Gain is the result of many years of experience and is definitely the best normalizer out there, I have no doubt.

Even for very advanced users, it offers different settings to adjust exactly what you are looking for. Pewreo if you are a common user, you will not need anything, just load the song or video (you can normalize one or hundreds at the same time) and click a button, it’s that simple.

Normalize audio and video to improve loudness, tips to achieve better normalization.

Normalize audio and video to improve loudness, tips to achieve better normalization.

Normalize Audio

Many years ago when the motion picture and recorded audio industry started, there were no problems with the volume of individual songs or individual video or movie broadcasts in theaters.

Audio Normalization

One of the main reasons is that each time one of these multimedia contents was produced they ended with a mastering which, among other things, took care of the volume level and in general the dynamics of the sound.

For some years now, the technical processes to encode the audio and also the image are not made by professionals but by people who download a program and start encoding audios and videos without having the equipment or training to do so.

On the other hand, especially in the area of video, there has been a boom in independent video production, many times carried out on cell phones that are not prepared and designed to record my video or high-quality audio.

In fact, even good quality microphones are not always used, but the phone’s own microphone is often used and sometimes at a considerable distance from the person who is speaking.

Later this video is edited more by intuition than by knowledge and this is how it is distributed on the net.

The same happens with music that is encoded, edited and recorded with more desire than knowledge.

All this has generated that when a person has several videos or several audio recordings, they immediately perceive that there is a great difference in the loudness of these videos or these songs.

Initially we talked about how before music was heard by people through radio broadcasters, for example, which had expensive hardware equipment, such as exciters and compressors, which were used to maintain a constant volume with a loudness dynamics that allowed it to be audible to a constant volume level.

The same thing happened with television and movie theaters.

The music that came out of the recording studios of the big record companies had careful mastering is where, among other things, they made sure that the output db was always in the correct range, the same can be said of television or film production companies that in addition to the equipment to compress the audio They also had professionals who took care of all this.

Today with the freedom for everyone to produce and share audio and video something that has been neglected You could say what is the standard of quality and loudness levels of video and audio volume.

That is why after many years of improvements the Mp4Gain has reached totally professional levels where music and video are treated and improved and optimized to reach the professional level in terms of quality and loudness of the audio volume.

Mp4Gain is also used to process audio files or video files to standardize the loudness of the volume, which is popularly known as normalizing the volume of the audio and normalizing the volume of the videos.

There is no other program that fulfills these functions at a professional level and at such a reasonable cost that anyone can have in their home.

It is no longer necessary to spend thousands of dollars to have professional compressors and exciters, but with a few tens of dollars anyone who distributes audio or video can determine that the sound of it is professional, standardized and perfectly audible.

Normalize or improve the volume of audio or video files

When vinyl records existed, music was recorded in an analog way, nobody ever thought about the space they occupied, because the amount of information was not a variable that will be taken into account.

On the other hand, when a new technology appeared that would allow the audio to be digitized, the space occupied by such information did have relevance.

Especially when it was stored on desktop computers that had hard drives that had little space.

Then the idea arose to compress the music trying to discard information but always trying that this process would not be noticeable.

But an important part of the process that is used to compress music is based on volume.
The volume of the different sounds is measured assuming that when there is a louder sound, the other sounds nearby at that frequency can be eliminated without the human being noticing it.

And in general the process of eliminating information added to what has been called the war of the volume What made the songs to be recorded a higher volume each time, have generated that the collections of audio files have very large differences in loudness between one audio file and one audio file.

And this has made it necessary to normalize the volume and loudness of the audio either from the audio files or from the video files.

Because with the video files the same thing happens: the audio that accompanies the video is also compressed and the same loss of information is suffered by what the musical files.

Therefore it does not matter if it is an MP4 or an mp3 or any other audio or video format, it is most likely necessary to normalize the volume to obtain an adequate loudness.

This is why it is so common that even batch normalization is done.
In other words, many audio or video files are normalized at the same time because people have large audio or video connections that need loudness normalization to correct loudness and volume problems.

Mp4gain is the only and the most efficient program that has the ability to normalize the loudness of most of the audio and video formats.

In turn, mp4gain is an audio converter and a video converter and even a converter. What can extract audio from a video file AND transfer it to an audio format.

Extract the audio from an MP4 and convert it into an mp3 with high sound quality.

Batch normalization of videos

Since the ability to digitize audio was born, as you can use many different codecs, different containers, different sample trates, different bitrates, etc. it can be verified that this has produced that the level of sound of different videos is not the same.

Single or batch normalization of videos

Then the need has arisen to normalize the loudness of videos of very diverse formats.
Mp4Gain comes to be the solution to be able to normalize in batch mode or in sigle mode the lodness of the videos.

Increase the loudness of a video in any format

With Mp4Gain you can normalize the volume level of any audio or video file in the most popular formats.

It really has been a breakthrough to be able to boost the volume of a video file or a group of video files with just one click.

In fact, apart from normalizing the volume, mp4gain is also capable of Modifying the PC without modifying the speed and vice versa, or of equalizing the sound to improve it and some other very useful functions.

Of course it is capable of converting most of the audio and video formats to each other.

With which you can convert a video format into any other video format, an audio format into any other audio format, but you can also convert a video format into any other audio format, that is, extract the audio from any video and get a mp3 in flac or any other popular audio format of your choice.