Hiya!
I was thinking, is this pure coincidence, or am I missing out on some important point of ripping?
Right now I'm using more/less default EAC extraction setty, w/ LAME --preset fast standard.
Take a look on this waveform spectrum.
(http://i46.tinypic.com/jt6zr8.png)
On top is an Alice In Chains song, not my rip.
In the bottom is an Zion I song, not my rip either.
In the middle, is my rip. An old Wu-Tang Clan album. I notice there's a distinct difference in volume on the songs. When played in a portable, I have to boost volume on my rips, 'cuz this is not just for these songs, but all my rips gets this volume. So I wonder, have I missed out on some checkbox that make the waveform go more like the top/bottom waveforms? Good volume, yet not any audible clipping.
Ty in adv.
G.
I don't know, the middle one looks best to me. Look at those dynamics!
You might want to read these articles...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) (why the first and last rip look like sausages)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replaygain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replaygain) (the solution to your problem)
The approach that I will follow when I copy music to my mobile is to process the audio before encoding from lossless to AAC so that the perceived loudness matches more or less. In your case, as you said you use MP3s, you can actually change the volume of the MP3s after encoding indestructively (well unless you remove the tags) using a tool called Mp3Gain:
http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/ (http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/)
PS:but all my rips gets this volume.
You're making some people jealous of your CD collection. You seem to have many original releases from the early 90s.
Thanks for your fulfilling answer Fandango.
That article on "Loadness war" was really interesting, and indeed the solution to what was my issue. I realized that the binding element here was, oh, hahahah, now I suddenly see the subtle nudge with that finnish quote of yours, yeah, just awsome! Anyways, yeah, as I was saying, affected rips were all 90's stuffs, therefor the lower default gain. I wasn't sure on this, so I (before reading that amazing Wiki article) started asking myself if it was really more/less "standard" for supreme rippers to pull ie. the EAC normalize opt for rips. Also, might I add, I'm familiar with aswell ReplayGain as Mp3Gain, thing is, even those "lower volume" rips (90's stuff ie.) are actually getting reduced(!) gain after pulling a simple mp3gain /r respectively. So, I even started asking myself if it could be the case that [again] "those supreme rippers out there" are in fact pulling some sort of dynamic range compressors as more/less default setty on their wave extracts [as you were implementing] before(!) doing the actual ->lossless/lossy compression. Anyways, I was muddling myself, 'cuz Loudness war was the real answer. I also realized this by actually fetching an old rip from one" of those supreme rippers out there" on one of my own CD albums that I've ripped, and compared waveforms. Turned out that [ofc] they had achieved the same "lower chart" gain in their rips. Heh, wow, this became some lecture, huh? Merry Christmas!
Well, if the perceived loudness still bugs you after applying gain with Mp3Gain or some other ReplayGain enabled converter, you could in fact just do what the mastering engineers did: add a compressor stage before replaygaining and then adjusting the gain and then encoding to MP3, so that the dynamic range is narrowed down a bit.