[sclug] [Fwd: Make my mp3s louder]

[Neil Haughton]

Sorry - take 2: typos removed.

Can anyone suggest how to make my ogg/mp3 tracks louder?

I have a number of my own CDs which I've ripped and encoded as either
Ogg or MP3 format, and stored on my Nokia phone which also doubles up as
a music player. (It's okay for cycling through the traffic, before
anyone asks about quality :-) )

The trouble is that a number of the CDs are noticably quieter than I
would like. I'm talking average level here, so it's not a dynamic
compression issue. My recently purchased remastered Roxy music albums
are a case in point.

As I see it the uncompressed ripped (pre Org/MP3 encoding) signal is
really just a stream of numbers representing instantaneous signal levels, so on the
face of it multiplying these numbers by some constant factor should, in
effect and up to a point, increase the amplitude when restored to an analogue signal.
The question is are there any tools out there that will do this for me? I've looked at
SoundJuicer, Audacity and Ardour (the latter looked most likely to offer
this kind of thing) but for the love of me I can't find any such
facilities. Odd really, because amplitude control is surely a basic in
any music processing (isn't it?), or am I overlooking something
blindingly obvious?

TIA

Neil.