Suggestions for preparing music for burning to disk

[Lithp]

Hello,
I am in the process of gathering my favourite Thin Lizzy(ever heard of them?) songs as mp3's. I will eventually burn them to a disk in the near future. Unfortunatly, I do not have the money right now to buy quality cd burning software so I am going to use musicmatch as my burner software- unless someone can suggest better (free) for the time being.
Anyway my question is, should I convert the songs to wav and at the same time sound level them with dMC first or just burn them as is?
Or does anyone have any better suggestions for me?
Thank you in advance.

[MODatic]

I would recommend that you convert them to Wave then burn them to CD with Exact Audio Copy (http://exactaudiocopy.de/) which is free and will do a great job at burning them to CD for you. Musicmatch's Audio CD burning quality is just as questionable as its ripping quality.

[Lithp]

Thank you for your advice. I have read just recently that volume levelling is actually a bad idea- any comments?

[Spoon]

Alot of people in these audio advice forums comonly follow each other like sheep and 'talk the talk'...

Really volume normalizing is not a bad idea if you want all your tracks to sound the same volume, it sure beats reaching for the volume knob each track.

[totalXSive]

volume levelling is actually a bad idea

It depends. If you're normalising an MP3 while converting it to a lossless format (Wave, AIFF, Monkey's Audio, FLAC etc.) then it won't affect the sound quality.

But if you're converting to a lossy format (ie back to MP3, or to WMA, Ogg Vorbis, VQF...) then the end result will sound marginally worse, since the file has been re-encoded. I will emphasise that the loss in sound quality is marginal - you have to have quite a trained ear to be able to pick up any difference.

Also, bear in mind that it makes no difference when just converting 1 song, since the point of normalising is to make all songs the same volume. If you have nothing to compare it against, it's just going to add more time to the conversion process, and is unnecessary anyway.

There you go, that's the truth about normalising :)

[Razgo]

when I create demo cd's for my friend, I always use the "volume normalize" function. as all sample tracks need to be heard without having to turn the volume up and down as Spoon pointed out.

also if you are creating a variety of different tracks to burn from different artists, "volume normalize" will become your best friend :D

[Lithp]

Hmm...
Interesting. Thank you for your replies. So when normalizing does DB Mucic Converter take an average of the volume, the lowest or the highest level??

[daren]

Highest level.

Otherwise the peaks in the music would go over the top and distort.

Rgrds,
Daren.