Not sure which is the right term but whatever the case, I want to be able to listen to classical & jazz in my car w/o needing to constantly raise (and lower) the volume during the quiet (loud) parts. My cds are ripped to flac and I want to convert to dynamically-compressed mp3 data for car listening. Does mediamonkey have a plugin for this? (I searched but didn't see anything). If no, can anyone suggest an application that does a good job of this?
I am going to sound like a broken record from my soap box. Flac is lossless and lossless is unaltered. Normalizing is altering. Normalizing FLAC is asking to have your cake and eat it too. People that want to listen to perfect sounding replicas of audio listen to 320 CBRs or VBRs at the extreme settings. The human ear and brain normally can't hear/process all that is on a recording. We can't see X-rays and we can only see 12 frames a second not an infinite number of frames a second. Somehow we have come to grips with limits to our sight but not sound . We really do not ‘hear’ every tone made by each string in a symphony. People that want to hear raw audio, listen to lossless audio. Yes, MM does have that feature but it is not a plug in. MM should not allow you to normalize lossless since lossless is just unaltered raw music. I really do not know if it will allow you to normalize a disk made of lossless files since I do not use lossless. It is a little check box in the bottom left corner of the first page of the burn process. Sorry for my rantings. The overuse of lossless is a pet peeve of mine. We have persons making lossless copies of the radio and other equally low quality sources because they have no idea what they are doing. I don't know why that should bother me but it does. Lossless does have its place in the audio world. I actually don't have much problem with ripping to lossless. It is just if you have the CD why go to lossless? Lossless is more important if it is your only copy.
Correction, MM has a volume leveling routine. MM does not compress music. Foobar2000 has more options of this sort an is considered the best in that area. It is the most difficult to use of the big 3. WinAmp is the other giant and is more like MM. I think you may want volume leveling not normalization not compression. Leveling is the most primitive of the three methods. It is just like turning the volume up or down once before each tune. The RELATIVE peaks and lows are not affected. The other processes do effect the relative highs and lows. They make the highs lower and the lows higher. Normalization makes the highs softer and the lows louder and does so against an average value from picked set of music. There are different methods to apply the normalization. You can pick from 2 using Foosbar2000. Compression does pretty much the same thing but is against an absolute set of values. You say 'I do not want sounds louder than x and softer then y'. When looking at a loudness graph of the range between the peaks and valleys is 'compressed' after this process. I would personally not use MM to level my music library but I always level CDs. I have been looking into this off an on for the last 6 months. I really got into it today. I do not want to effect the music in a permenent way. I want to be able to change my mind. I want to keep the music in tact but not need to play with the volume control. The less altering of the real deal the better for me.
