If you’re like me, you have some music mp3s that are just a little too quiet for your liking. Most of my songs are loud enough for me, but some make me reach over to my speakers and turn them up. But there is a way to fix those pesky quiet songs, and that is with MP3Gain.
First off, you need to download and install the package. If you’re one of the fortunate ones running Ubuntu, this is no problem. Make sure your repositories are up to date and then enter this command from the command line:
sudo apt-get install mp3gain
That was easy, wasn’t it? Now that you have MP3Gain, try it out on one of your quiet songs. Again from the command line, enter this command:
mp3gain -r -k quietsong.mp3
After MP3Gain finished with your quiet song, give it a listen and see if the changed settings are to your liking. If you like the change, try it on another song, and see if the results are still to your liking. If you do not like the end result, you can always revert the mp3 back to it’s original state by issuing the command:
mp3gain -u quietsong.mp3
If the default settings of MP3Gain are not quite to your liking, you can change the output volume. You can change the gain dB up or down, whichever your prefer. To make your mp3 louder still, enter this command:
mp3gain -r -d 3 reallyquietsong.mp3
Experiment with the gain value until you find what you like. The value doesn’t have to be “3″ as indicated in the command above; it can be any number of values like 1.5, 2, 5, etc.
To make an mp3 a little quieter, just enter a negative number in the command above, like this:
mp3gain -r -d -2 loudsong.mp3
If the default values in MP3Gain work for you, or if you tweaked around and find an output you like, you can even adjust your entire mp3 collection by issuing this command:
find . -name *mp3 -exec mp3gain -a -k {} \;
If you have a large music collection, this could take a while so you might want to go find something else to do while this is processing. More information regarding MP3Gain can be found at the following sites:
(This is a reprint of a post I did on another blog)
Loading ...
August 18th, 2008 at 9:37 am
This is too hard. And there is a better alternative. You can get an easy frontend for this, so you just point-and-click
http://sourceforge.net/project....._id=207001
August 18th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I wasn’t aware of this at the time I wrote that post. Thanks for the tip, I will definitely look into it!