Normalising playback levels of music files in a car. BMW 3 series.

[Orchardmead]

Please forgive me, but I am completely new to all this. I am having a problem digesting everything and putting it into practice.

I have a later BMW 3 series and it has a 20gb hard drive in the Professional Media Centre for storing and playing back music in compressed format. I have some old music files stored in mp3 format that I ripped years ago. I have put these files onto a USB drive and imported them into the car's Hard Drive as described by the handbook and allowed in the car menu system. This is one way of importing music and playing it back. It works fine.

Also the car has a CD/DVD player and the car's Professional Media Centre gives me the option of importing CDs and DVDs of various formats onto the Hard Drive whilst they are playing. Again in compressed format. This works fine also.

The problem I have is that these imported mp3 files and albums imported from the CD player, all play back at different volume levels. This causes a lot of grief and as I understand it, is a common problem.

The car's menu handbook says it plays back compressed audio files: mp3, wma, aac, m4a, m4b,ogg.

Just recently I have ripped all my CDs to flac and have them all stored on a external HD. So now to my questions if I may.

1. Which is the best format to convert the flac files to for solely importing into the car? I was thinking of using a variable bit rate and .mp3 files for efficiency. Naturally I will be keeping my flac files for other conversions as I consider these as my master files and do not want to rip all my cds again. Is this the best way?

2. I need to ensure all my music plays back at the same volume. I understand this is called normalising! Also I have seen something about ReplayGain or similar wording. So, how do I ensure they are all at the same volume level for play back in the car?

I would be most grateful for any advice provided. I hope it is not too complicated for a pensioner and I wish to put as many of my files as I can onto the car's Hard Drive without too much quality loss.

If it helps, my house PC is using Windows 7 x 64 bit Professional.

Thanks and kind regards

Peter

[garym]

Re: Normalising playback levels of music files in a car. BMW 3 series.

Install the ReplayGain DSP from dbpa Codec Central. Convert your FLAC files to mp3 for use in the car, while keeping the FLAC files for other uses (I'd convert to mp3 lame -v2 for use in car, mostly tranparent lossy for most music). In this conversion, add DSP affects for Replay Gain and Volume Normalization. Your car player doesn't likely read ReplayGain tags, but the apply volume normalization will change the audio of your mp3 files to incorporate the RG adjustment. Use RG Track Gain for your volume normalization. This makes all tracks sound approximately the same volume.

[Orchardmead]

Re: Normalising playback levels of music files in a car. BMW 3 series.

Install the ReplayGain DSP from dbpa Codec Central. Convert your FLAC files to mp3 for use in the car, while keeping the FLAC files for other uses (I'd convert to mp3 lame -v2 for use in car, mostly tranparent lossy for most music). In this conversion, add DSP affects for Replay Gain and Volume Normalization. Your car player doesn't likely read ReplayGain tags, but the apply volume normalization will change the audio of your mp3 files to incorporate the RG adjustment. Use RG Track Gain for your volume normalization. This makes all tracks sound approximately the same volume.

garym

Thanks for the information. Your assistance is appreciated. Let me get this correct. I should convert the flac files over to mp3 format and apply DSP ReplayGain and apply normalisation together?

You do realise the latest version of dbPoweramp using ReplayGain has Variable Bit Rate Quality: -V4 and with the codec installed the menu software gives 3 separate options as follows:

RG ReplayGain (Apply) with options as follows:

Track gain
Album gain

Also it has options for:

Calculate Missing ReplayGain values ?
Write Calculated Track Gain to Source File

Which of the above options should I use?

Given the above information, is it not enough to to just apply the ReplayGain values to the whole of the directory of flac files and output to a new mp3 directory that I will use to import into the car?

Do I still have to apply the volume Normalisation as well? It has more options as follows:

Peak to Peak (appears to be the default)
ReplayGain (track gain)
Adaptive
Fixed Amplification

This gets confusing and stops me taking what appears to be a logical progression to solving my problem.



Thanks again

Kind regards

Peter

[garym]

Re: Normalising playback levels of music files in a car. BMW 3 series.

garym

Thanks for the information. Let me get this correct. I should convert the flac files over to mp3 format and apply DSP ReplayGain and apply normalisation?

You do realise the latest version of dbPoweramp has Variable Bit Rate Quality: -V4 and with the codec installed the menu software gives 3 separate options as follows:

RG ReplayGain (Apply) with options as follows:

Track gain
Album gain

Also it has options for:

Calculate Missing ReplayGain values ?
Write Calculated Track Gain to Source File

Which of the above options should I use?

Given the above information, is it not enough to to just apply the ReplayGain values to the whole of the directory of flac files and output to a new mp3 directory that I will use to import into the car? Do I still have to apply the volume Normalisation as well?


Thanks again

A few things:

1. I always add RG tag values to my FLAC files (because the players I use for FLAC files recognize and use RG tags). When I create an mp3 mirror directory for use in my lossy devices, I have the options set to drop the RG values in the FLAC file and redo the mp3 files for new RG values. Probably doesn't make much if any difference, but the mp3 RG values will not be identical to the FLAC RG values. You can have the FLAC RG dropped (option setting) and add RG to mp3 with DSP as part of conversion so it is not an extra step.

2. For playback in car I would use RG ReplayGain (Apply) with the option of TRACK gain. This used to be called "radio station" gain. This tries to make every song from every album sound the same volume. ALBUM gain retains within album volume differences (that is a soft song on an album will remain soft compared to a loud song on the same album). TRACK gain will try to make all songs about the same volume. Because this is for car use, and you are likely to be doing random playlists, etc., I vote for TRACK gain.

3. Calculate missing is for adding RG values to mp3 files that don't have it and then writing it to the file. I'd check both those options when creating my mp3 files with apply RG.

4. Yes, I realize it has VBR. That is what I earlier suggested you use. I mentioned VBR of -V2. -V4 will make smaller files and 99% of the time will likely be transparent (i.e., you can't detect any difference between these files and playing the original FLAC file). I simply said I use -V2 to be even more sure of transparency (in case I'm using iphone with headphones). If I was doing what you are doing for the car, I'd likely use -V4 as well.

5. Even if you add RG tags to your new mp3 files, you likely still need to APPLY the RG values to normalize the volume of the mp3 files because most car players do NOT use the RG tags in playback. But when you APPLY the RG tags to your mp3 files, the audio volume is adjusted and it doesn't matter that the car player can't use RG tags, because now the volume adjustment is part of the audio of the files themselves.

[Orchardmead]

Re: Normalising playback levels of music files in a car. BMW 3 series.

garym

Thanks again. Some of what you have said sounds correct, but there is a whole lot that does not make sense to me because of my limited knowledge. My wife and I just want to listen to old pop records and the like whilst we are travelling in the car. Given that I am only interested in making sure that every track is around the same sound level for in car, is it possible for you to give me a short tick list that needs to be enabled or disabled from the options above?

Note. Some of the tracks I have are very quiet. Not quiet by definition of the music having quiet passages, but by virtue of them being old 1950s music on CD compilations that have been recorded at low levels. Whereas some of the latest albums have been recorded or transcoded at far higher levels. This difference in volumes is what I am trying to eliminate.
Sorry to be a pain!

Kind regards and thanks again

Peter

[garym]

Re: Normalising playback levels of music files in a car. BMW 3 series.

Don't use RG (apply) DSP. Instead:

1. Run dbpa Batch converter
2. Select the upper level directory of all your FLAC files (that is, you are selecting ALL your FLAC files, eg, c:\FLAC)
3. select CONVERT in the upper menu area
4. when the popup comes up on music converter
select mp3 (lame), target QUALITY VBR,
use slider to set for -V4
down in DSP Effects/Actions, select ADD
then select VOLUME NORMALIZE as the DSP
Then select SETTINGS for this
tick ReplayGain (track gain) and leave evertyhing else uncnecked but leave maximum amplification at 8 and 0 db as the default already is
for output location, check FOLDER and gen browse to a directory you have already created on your C: drive called something like c:\LOSSYMUSIC
then click the dynamic button and enter:

[TRIMFIRSTFOLDER][origpath][origfilename]

Then hit CONVERT in the bottom lower right of this screen. This should then run and convert all your FLAC files to mp3 files, -v4 quality, all set to a common volume adjustment for use in your car player.
For example, if your FLAC files were in:

c:\FLAC\ARTISTS\ALBUMS\tracks.flac....

the new mp3 files will be in:

c:\LOSSYMUSIC\ARTISTS\ALBUMS\tracks.mp3

copy these over to your car stereo and you should be good to go.

[Spoon]

Re: Normalising playback levels of music files in a car. BMW 3 series.

Correction:

[TRIMFIRSTFOLDER][origpath]\[origfilename][]

[Orchardmead]

Re: Normalising playback levels of music files in a car. BMW 3 series.

Thanks guys. Just the job.

regards

[Orchardmead]

Re: Normalising playback levels of music files in a car. BMW 3 series.

Thanks guys. Just the job.

regards

Spoon and garym

1. This answer above from me is an understatement. It took the program a little over 1 hour and 15 minutes to carry out the conversion of the music that I need in the car. The size of the flack directory was 56gb that I converted and the final mp3 directory was in the region of 9gb. The volume levels were not quite normalised on the really old tracks, but the difference was not enough to worry me.

2. One further question. I have some audio books in flac format. Do I use the same parameters or just do a straight mp3 conversion without normalising?

Thanks again

Regards

[garym]

Re: Normalising playback levels of music files in a car. BMW 3 series.

Spoon and garym

1. This answer above from me is an understatement. It took the program a little over 1 hour and 15 minutes to carry out the conversion of the music that I need in the car. The size of the flack directory was 56gb that I converted and the final mp3 directory was in the region of 9gb. The volume levels were not quite normalised on the really old tracks, but the difference was not enough to worry me.

2. One further question. I have some audio books in flac format. Do I use the same parameters or just do a straight mp3 conversion without normalising?

Thanks again

Regards

Thanks. And glad it worked for you. And yes, volume normalizing is not perfect, it just makes the volume differences not quite so jarring. For your audio books, I'd do the same thing, but I'd leave off the volume normalization DSP. No need really as you don't listen to one chapter from one book followed by a random chapter from a different book. So for converting audiobooks, I'd just convert to mp3 at something like -V4 (or even -V6, as this is spoken word not music). Same steps, just not using the Volume Normalization DSP. Naming gets more complicated with audiobooks, so make sure you have that right in order to play the correct chapters in order.