This has already been suggested. However, it still won't solve the problem of songs which sound like they are at different volume levels.

I used to think as you do: That normalization was the key to making all the songs sound evenly loud. After playing around with normalizing some "quiet" albums, I discovered that this is not the case. Different songs are mixed with different amounts of dynamic compression. The more dynamically compressed a song is, the louder it seems. It's like television commercials: They sound louder than the television shows. It's not because the TV shows don't hit the peak (in fact the TV shows and the commercials are both normalized to the same peaks), it's just that the commercials are dynamically compressed so that all of the sounds (even the quiet ones) are closer to that peak.

It is possible that an algorithm could be written which measures the overall loudness of a piece (not based on peaks alone), but such an algorithm would be complicated to write and it would take a lot of CPU time to churn on each file.

I still think that the Empeg or Emplode should allow the user to assign a "relative volume" parameter to the songs, but if you based that parameter on peaks alone, it wouldn't make much of a difference. It would take a lot of work to assign those values to your entire collection.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144