Hi Tony.

My main point is that even when two differently-produced pieces of music are equally normalized, they will still sound like they are playing at radically different volumes. Normalization won't make all your songs sound like they are at the same volume if they are produced differently.

I support your main point: Normalization (if you refer to the one that increases the amplitude (almost) as much as possible without clipping) will not make sure that two songs sound as being the same volume if they aren't ment to (and produced to, to use your words). However, there are only a few possibilities to make two songs sound as loud as each other (to a certain extend):

1. Normalize in the classic (amplitude) way. This leads to songs with similar peak volume. only similar, not the same, because of the difference between amplitude and volume.


2. Normalize in the more modern (power) way. This leads to songs with the same peak volume, but that peak volume might be reached during 80% of the playtime for one song, but only for 1% of the other, leading to different 'experienced' volumes nontheless.


3. Use one of the above, but change the normalization factor dynamically during the play (also called compression, like the voladj-Kernelpatch does). This will probably lead to extremely similar experienced volumes, but might disturb the artistic experience during the play of a single song if there are prolonged intentionally (more) silent periods.

The whole thing is: Todays Pop music is almost always compressed (volume wise) and almost all Pop CDs are also normalized to approx. 98% of the maximum possible peak amplitude, so normalization and also compression (again, volume wise) won't give you any advantage in most cases. If you are in an extremely unfriendly (loud) environment, you probably do gain some davantage by using dynamic sound compression (like voladj), if you are in a friendly (silent) environment, you probably will loose a little of the intended artistic experience.
If you are listening to classic or older Rock/Pop music, normalization (no matter if amplitude or power wise) will probably help in both environments, while dynamic compression imposes the same (dis)advantages as with modern Pop.
So, when you do use normalization, my tips are:

• Be aware that, depending on your music collection, you won't gain much, but leaving CPU time aside, you don't loose anything either.
• Therefore, use normalization, but if you ask me, tell your software to only normalize (to approx. 98%) if the peak volume (resp. amplitude) is below 95%. Your would be able to tell the difference between a 95% and a 98% song anyway.

The reason why I won't recommend normalizing to 100% is that the encoding to MP3 and it's subsequent decoding sometimes increase the peak amplitude of a song to some extend, and using 98% normalization, you don't take the risk of that causing any clipping on the empeg's digital part.

Do we agree now?

cu,
sven