Topic: cd volume

[Muddy Das]

I burned a cd of the one show i taped so far but for some reason the volume of the cd is very quiet. I have to crank the volume way up on any system i play it on to hear any music. I used sound forge in post and winamp to burn the cd. Oh and it was in wave files. Thanks in advance for all advice.

[page]

Two things:

1) What was the max peak of the CD at? (a negative decibel number)
2) What was the RMS value of the entire CD?

Soundforge should be able to tell you. I don't use it so you'll have to dig through the help file, but these two bits of information would help us give better advice.

[dorrcoq]

That's why they have volume knobs   Seriously though, you should be able to boost the levels with SF - use the normalize function.

[DSatz]

Try running "Statistics" from the "Tools" menu in Sound Forge. It will tell you what the peak levels were in each channel of the recording. You can then use the "Volume" item in the "Process" menu to raise the level so that your overall peak levels are as close to 0 dB as you care to get. (Suggestion: Leave 1/2 a dB or even a whole dB of headroom, because there are some crappy players out there--don't push the peaks quite all the way to 0 dB.)

The thing is, our ears'/brains' response isn't directly based on peak levels; it's based more on something closer to what the Statistics dialog calls "RMS levels"--but it's the peak levels that set the limit on how high a signal level you can record on a CD. As a result there can be no standard level that would make all CDs sound as if they were recorded at the same levels as each other; each disc sets its own context as far as listening volume is concerned, and that's just the way it is.

When you raise the overall levels of a recording, you are raising the inherent noise of the recording by the same degree as you're raising the intended signal. That's just another fact of life; it probably won't influence what you're doing here. But it should enter into your thinking when you set your recording levels in the first place--there's no point in deliberately leaving a large amount of unused headroom in a live recording.

--best regards

[Muddy Das]

So the rms was around -28.  I used the volume to turn things up a little. I guess i just need not to be so stingy with the levels when recording.

What is the difference in soundforge with Normalize, Volume, and out going gain in the eq. To me they all seem to do the same thing. Turn up the outgoing signal, right?

[DSatz]

In Sound Forge, each window displays a signal that you have open for editing. It might be a file that you just opened, or it might be a file that you opened and then processed in some way, or a signal that you created in some other way entirely (e.g. by recording it live, or by synthesizing it), that doesn't exist (yet) as a sound file.

If you run Statistics on the signal, the dialog box will tell you the "Minimum sample value" and "Maximum sample value" for each channel. For example, if the minimum sample value for one channel says "-8,230 (-12.00 dB, -25.12 %)" while the maximum sample value says "11,638 (-8.99 dB, 35.52%)" then you could safely use the Volume control to raise the level of that entire channel (for the whole file) by any amount up to almost 9 dB. You take whichever of the two numbers has the lower "absolute value" (value regardless of positive or negative sign).

You're probably dealing with stereo recordings so you probably want to leave their balance unchanged if you're boosting the levels. In that case, figure out the lower absolute value for each channel separately as I just described, then compare the results for the two channels and use the value from the channel that had the lower absolute value; you can safely raise the entire file (both channels at the same time) by anything up to that amount.

The "Normalize" control does the statistics and the math for you, is all. But I don't recommend that you use it until/unless you understand what it's doing.

--best regards