Audacity Help... [making MP3 files all the same volume]

[Bribarian]

Hey guys, I'm working on a new board for calls.

I'm having some trouble getting the audio right though.

I was wondering if any Audacity veterans could tell me if the program is capable of doing this........  I want to take one audio clip that's perfect, one line.  And then I want to take all the other audio clips and have them match up as closely as they can, whether or not, they have to go up in volume or down.  Like a mass equalization, but very fine tweaking.... 

[jackulator]

what you need is a program called MP3 Gain -- always do a test folder first though... like copy all the mp3s you want to change the volume of into a new folder and run MP3 Gain on them -- or at least save a backup

it's a great little program and I'm pretty sure it's free

[Sir? what do ya think?]

Run audio compression.

Set the noise floor to around 35-40db and have the threshold be around 20. Run it with the lowest latency possible at a fairly high ratio.

Make sure you've removed any noise and unwanted crap beforehand. You can either set it to reduce peaks and then reset gain to -0db again or you could set it to compressed based on peaks that'll just raise everything below your threshold to match the highest peaks. It's a good idea to normalize beforehand in that case.

I never use any specialized applications to do this. It's very easy to do in most audio and video suites.

Edit: It might be an idea not to use "compress based on peaks" but rather to have it compress down and then normalize back up.

If you're worried that the audio on some files is going to be too quiet, then set your threshold higher. Then just run it as a batch filter.