Loudness Normalization: Why is it necessary to Normalize the loudness of an audio or a video?
The war of volume or loudness war.
Already in the 1940s and in later decades, in the middle of the vinyl record era, a volume war was experienced.
The goal was to make a song sound louder on the radio, louder than other songs and louder than advertising.
Sure, the limitations of vinyl didn’t allow the ability to indiscriminately increase volume to be possible.
But with the advent of CDs and digital music it was possible to push the loudness of a song to the max. The situation is that the digitization of the audio allowed it to be manipulated quite precisely, achieving dynamic normalizations that actually ended the dynamics of the music and then played all the time at maximum volume.
By the 90s, groups like Red Hot Chilli Peppersm and their album Californication took this war of loudness to levels rarely seen.
But why did they do that?
Some research on human hearing showed that people did not find that a song sounded better if it had louder loudness.
Every artist, every producer, and every hardware manufacturer has figured out a way to make their production sound louder, louder.
Digitally many limiters and compressors pointed in that direction and made a lot of music sound almost to the point of distortion.
Each one wanted their music to stand out, among other things for being louder and having a greater sound, a higher volume level.
If to this recipe we add the appearance of the mp3 and a great variety of encoders, and also that ordinary people did not understand the effect that the bit rate could produce, then many mp3s with different qualities were generated.
The possibility of sharing these mp3s filled people with mp3s that each had very different sounds. Both for its production and for its coding.
Then a new need appeared: normalize the music to avoid these disparities in loudness, in the volume of the songs.
The holy grail of normalization had to be found.
Many ideas were found, many experiments. The situation matured and certain products like Mp3Doctor and Mp4Gain matured to the point where they actually managed to find the solution: a dynamic standardization that will work well with today’s advanced player equipment.
Then Mp4Gain made the leap, achieving that even videos could not be normalized.
Audio could already be normalized in its main formats (mp34, aac, ogg, floac, etc) with Mp3Doctor, but Mp4Gain added the possibility of these dynamic normalization to video in its main formats (mp4, 3gp, flv, avi, etc. )
