Volume Balance (and Beck)

I've never written about it before at this blog, but one issue with posting albums here that has been a constant bother for me is volume balance. What I mean is, some songs are mixed much louder than others, so when I put together an album from different sources, I need to do something about that to make them sound good together. 

Unfortunately, for the past few decades, there has been a growing "loudness war," where songs are mixed to be louder and louder, in order to get more attention on the radio and on iTunes playlists and such. This has led to a problem known as "brickwalling," where if you look at the sound profile of a song, it can look like one solid block, much like a brick wall. The result is that much of the subtlety in the music is lost, such as the contrast between the loud and quiet parts of the songs.

I hate brickwalling, and I've tried my best to combat it. To help with that, I've used a program called "mp3gain." If you run it on some songs, it attempts to detect songs that are too loud or too quiet and set them at a standard volume. But I've discovered over time that it's from perfect. In can crudely get the songs in the right ballpark, but to really get them right I have to check each sound profile and make further adjustments. It's as much an art as a science. For instance, what if you have one song that has a consistent volume all the way through, compared to another song that's mostly quiet but has a couple of very loud sections? The same maximum volume doesn't work well if you apply it the same to both.

The differences caused by the "loudness war" can be dramatic. A song that is brickwalled can be two or three times as loud as one that is not. So if you listen to my albums, and then some other albums, mine may be on the quiet side. But there would be a problem like that no matter what I do, because there's such inconsistency and variability in the loudness from album to album these days. I refuse to fall into the loudness war trap by making things extra loud, and have stuck to the recommended average volume suggested by mp3gain. I suggest you use a volume normalizer program like mp3gain to bring the brickwalled albums in your music collection down to more reasonable and consistent levels.

Posting albums on this blog has been a learning experience for me. When I started out over two years ago, I pretty much entirely relied on the program mp3gain for the volume adjustments. Now, when I listen to some of the albums I posted in the first year or so of this blog, sometimes I'm embarrassed by how inconsistent the volume levels can be from song to song. So in the last week or so, I've started trying to fix those albums posted in the first year. 

It's going to be a long and time consuming task, since I often have to look at the sound profile of every single song. If anyone knows of any tools to help with this other than mp3gain, please let me know! I've started out by redoing ALL of the albums by Beck that I've posted here. Most of those were posted in the first year, and most of them needed volume balance work. I just redid all the links today, so I invite you to redownload those, if you care about this volume balance issue. I believe I updated 13 of his albums.

If and when I update the links for other major artists because of volume balance, I'll let you know. Also, if anyone wants to help me fix the volume levels of the albums I've posted, I sure would appreciate it. Then I could concentrate all my focus here on posting more new music instead.