Audio loudness

[George Simmons]

Quick question - why is the loudness of the audio through the sequence editor less than while playing the same mp3 file through Audacity, Real Player, WMP, or Winamp? Is this the same loudness or line level that will be relayed to the FM transmitter when the show is running? Is there any way to affect this within the LOR S2 software? Okay, that was more than one question but any answers to any one of them will be appreciated.

I've edited every song through Audacity to set bit rates, tweak bass on some older ones and to set loudness on all as close as possible to each other. None have given me any trouble except for the noticeable drop in loudness when played through the sequence editor. That, plus the fact there seems to be a bigger difference in loudness from one song to the next than what I hear when they're played in other players also.

Ideas, anyone?

Thanks.

[iresq]

I have noticed that the sequence editor volume is lower than normal. I don't really sweat it.

Are you using mp3 or wav? With wav, you want to normalize them. Audacity can do that.

With mp3's, I use a program call mp3gain. It's free. I set mine to 91db (this is the figure I use for my DJ music). A nice feature of mp3gain is it can batch process. Simply point it to your sequence music and let it go.

[bob]

It seems that whenever you explicitly run WMP, it automatically sets its volume to whatever level that you had previously set it to the last time that you explicitly ran WMP.

This is a volume unique to WMP itself; changing it doesn't seem to change any of the various volumes you can set in Control Panel, nor vice versa. So, for example, if you have it set to 75%, I guess that's supposed to be 75% of whatever you have your Control Panel master volume set to.

However, when a program (such as LOR) uses WMP, WMP does not automatically set its volume level in this manner. Instead, WMP always defaults to 50%.

LOR does not touch the volume (except in one relatively rare instance, not during play, where we turn it to zero for a split second, and then back to whatever it was). So it's always at the default setting, 50%.

There is currently no way to affect the volume from within LOR. I think it would be a good idea to have such a way, though.

[garyfunk]

There is a thread over at PlanetChristmas that might be of interest.

http://forums.planetchristmas.com/showthread.php?t=26782

[Kevin McQuarters]

I tried Audacity and many other "free" packages but found them a bit cumbersome for my skill level. Basically, too many options for my needs.

I have not encountered the loudness or the floating bitrate issues when using the following editor. No connection to author and I do have the "Deluxe" version.

http://www.free-sound-editor.com/index.html