Normalize loudness

Perhaps you should give you music a treatment with http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/

It's not a perfect solution, but it works for sure and it'll do for now I recon.
But as ashughes said, you're a bit unclear in your description...

sorry for being unclear.
What I mean is that my mp3 are recorded at different volume and it would be great that songbird play it all at the same level. The best solution for media players is to analyse the track and calculate the gain it should apply to normalize volume, then store this gain in metadata to apply it each time the track is played (without modifying the file itself).
MP3Gain uses the "replay gain" algorithm I mentionned earlier and can store the gain value in metadatas. The problem is that I don't know if songbird uses this value (I've never tested mp3gain) and it would be really convenient if it was done automatically by songbird ^^

Well on the wikipedia page I linked their's a list of player which does this (which includes winamp, mediamonkey, amarok (with a plugin)). iTunes also has its own way to normalize loudness so it is something which really exists ^^

ashuges: Don't tell me you don't know to search for existing bug reports :P

http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...

The docs for RG are at http://www.replaygain.org/

RG is pretty common these days. (See Wikipedia's media player comparison for a list of players that support RG.) Personally, Songbird's lack of ReplayGain support is the #1 thing keeping me from using it.

I think this is a good idea. I think of what he is saying compared to watching a show on the tv and it goes to a commercial break and suddenly the sound level is jacked up. Whenever I listen to music, whether it's on my computer or my Ipod, I have always been annoyed when I have to stop and adjust the volume because the sound level between 2 different tracks is imbalanced.

If I remember correctly, Windows Media Player has a feature to level the volume of tracks across a CD when burning. I would love to see this feature implemented when you are listening to an album or a custom playlist in Songbird.

Matt> foobar2000 can do both things. It supports replaygain and has a dynamic compressor DSP plugin.

Yes, Foobar does that, it's pretty cool, & for that matter I'm pretty Happy with the way it works in iTunes, (it's not ReplayGain, but you can assign persistent volume adjustments to tracks) But it will be most cool when Songbird is ready, & we have a cross-platform, open source, skinnable, customizable player.

Foobar is windows only, & rather geeky. I've seen amazing things done with it, but it's beyond the ability, or interest of most users. I've found customizing it to be over my head, but then I'm only mildly geeky.

Hopefully Songbird will do all the things the best players do -better.

It seems like there has been a focus on playlist management, & searching content, & not so much on audio so far. Hopefully that is coming, perhaps as a result of some of the discussions here. I really think a good EQ & some volume /gain management will be a must.

I think that foobar2000 is the player to follow. It offers a great set of features especially useful for audiophiles but for common users too.

I used to be a big fan of this player. But I got disappointed with the development. There are three plugins for user interface. One of them (the best one) was kicked off by the core developers. The other two are incompatible, which splits forces. And it is Windows-only. So I started looking for an alternative, which would be open-source, multiplatform and with good management of big libraries.

Songbird has the best potential to become such a player. It is still quite feature incomplete compared to foobar2000. But I can see the developers are heading the right way and they're gonna change this.

Btw. I created a user interface for foobar2000. It was easier compared to XUL editing in Songbird. Maybe I just don't have the correct documentation and knowledge yet, but I don't think that foobar2000 is too geeky. It had something to offer for every kind of user. This is the same reason why so many people love Firefox and I hope Songbird will follow it's Mozilla partner.

I'm sorry I went quite off topic.

of course geekiness is relative... I never figured out how to implement skins, or customize anything in foobar, or even manage playlists. (I'll admit I didn't try that hard..)

- I find iTunes to be vastly more intuitive/easier to use, & has many cool/advanced features, & great sound. Of course it has strict limitations, being Windows/Mac only, proprietary, & not easily customizable.

I even had a very pretty black & blue skin for iTunes on Windows, implemented through Multi-Plugin, an unofficial plug-in, but Multi-Plugin is no longer developed, and wont work past iTunes 7.0.2.16

I've tried a lot of players, & liked a lot of things about several of them, but iTunes always seemed to be best overall... but you can never really own it, you know?

-- So we are all looking for the same thing: a cross-platform, open source, customizable, extensible, well thought out, cool player; "The Firefox of media players"
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Here's the thing; In my view; GOOD SOUND MUST COME FIRST, or none of the other cool features will matter. In addition to this thread there are threads & bug reports about EQ & some complaints about the sound. -- see:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
etc.

Now we know the Dev's have heard these requests, & they're on the list, & that we're waiting on GStreamer, but improving the sound & sound tools still doesn't appear to be highest on the list according to the Roadmap.

I would've thought that making the player work well & sound good -as a music player- would come first (and even be easier?) rather than implementing some of the fancier web-related features.
For one thing; I think most of us already have ways to find content, both files and streams. I buy most of my music from Amazon, & listen to SomaFM a lot. & we already have a great web-browser; Firefox.

- so once it sounds really good, we could adopt the player as our main music-player early, & show it off to more people, & wait as cool web-search features, cover art, & even video playback, etc. are developed.

just my 2cents. Still exited...

@Matt

I must add that your path as well as sentiments, seem aligned with mine... so, I am going to guess that there are a lot more of us wanting to see what you have stated.

I think someone was planning on implementing an equalizer as an addon, so. fingers crossed on that. Forgot the developer's name.

I honestly don't remember, but my guess is that we may see something like that sooner than later... they seem to respond well, so I am confident that these guys will push something out... sooner than later.

If you look at the roadmap it is set for the February '09 release (Hendrix).
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Roadmap

Please don't put a feature that changes the dynamic range of a track most tracks today are already over compressed at the mastering stage of production.
all song bird needs to do is look at the RMS level (RMS is a measure of the average loudness) of each track then reduce to gain accordingly.
Itunes does this though a feature they call sound check it also lists the gain reduction for each track in the meta data. for example A-ha take on me is -0.2Db and Metalica is -10.4 (way over compressed lol)

Of course I agree, & I suspect the others here would as well; such features should at the very least toggle on & off, -but hopefully be fully adjustable.
(maybe with a standard, & "expert" mode?)

-I like the two-tiered approach of iTunes & foobar with some real-time compensation (like sound-check) & track gain adjustments remembered in track info or meta-data.

-This works fairly well in iTunes, though some more adjustability would be nice.
They seem to have erred on the side of unobtrusive transparency with sound-check, so there can still be too great of volume changes in some situations.

I think there is a big difference between what kind of behavior you might want:

A. while giving your full attention to a classical/jazz/etc. performance, -possibly through expensive headphones,
(-you turn any "compression" etc. off, & listen to the performance as the artists intended..)
vs. :
B. watching TV late at night,
(Want to understand speech, but not disturb others..)

C. listening to your tunes or radio while working.
(-when a predictable, consistent, manageable, quiet-yet-audible, volume level might be the priority..)

D. listening on small or laptop speakers.
(when preventing distortion on peaks is most important..)

According to the Roadmap, volume normalization is planned for the feb 2009 release. Will this be Replaygain based (would be great because of compatibility!)

Hi Guys,

Songbird 1.1.1 stable version has just shipped and I'm taking a great interest into this feature as I have a rather large song library and the RMS/loudness from a track to another can be rather frustrating when you have to constantly reach and change the playback volume.

So I'm aware the Songbird team is working on a built-in scanning feature for RG calculations and metadata writing.

But in between I would like to know a good third party software that could scan and meta-print the RG gain value to my tracks quickly. What I need is something really minimalist that can handle a bunch of many tracks at a time. My library is essentially MP3 IDE3 or MP4 and I would get it fingerprinted with Replay Gain values so Songbird would be able to use them.

I know about foobar2000 or winamp doing this but I actually don't want another media player to be installed on my computer and MP3Gain seems to do it in a rather non-standard way so it could cause some issues with later implementations of this feature in Songbird itself.

So do you guys have another solution to suggest ?

iVolume is a good program. Not necessarily a cheap program ($30), but it works quite well and is very intuitive.