Permanent Equalization and Gaining on Audio

[sprunkie]

Hello,
I have been look for an program that can set equalization permanently to the song (what ever format; but I will convert for this). So, if I change my computer's player or mp3 player I don't have to start all over. The main goal I have is to archive my music once and for all. Hopefully there's a program that can apply the Eq's to multi-able track (or full albums)also.

And if the same program (or another) can volume gain the my entire catalog of music. Becasue I have had a quiet song play, then one of my normal volumed songs plays and then I have to change every thing. I tried itunes but it doesn't port to my ipod (which is the main problem). I do care if it 's a free or pay program. But free would be better.

And would this program that I am looking for be called an mastering program?
Oh,the simpler the better for the both programs(But not a problem either way).


Thanks for your help and any ideas,
sprukie

P.S. What is the best music (Library) player in your eyes(pc). And if works with an ipod would be nice but it's not that big deal. Well, thanks again.

[fishtoprecords]

Have you looked at replaygain? Its a feature on lots of products and works with both evil MP3 and nice flac files.

This does gain, not the EQ. I'm not sure how you would EQ in general, as what you need depends on room, speakers, etc.

[davmoo]

Mp3gain (http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/) will take care of you on the volume side of it. It does a good job, and its free (and open source if that matters to anyone).

[sprunkie]

Thanks, I will try them out. But, with the eq's it about removing the tinniness out of some of my tracks. Because for the most part I'm listen to my ipod with tri-port (Bose) head phones (which is about 95% of the time) So most eq's for rooms and speaker don't matter as much.

But I have been using Sony's Sound Forge 9.0 to edit tracks and eq's; which might be the best program for me right now. But thanks for all of your guys is help.

But any new ideas are always welcome and if I find something that works I will let you know.

[davmoo]

I don't know why I didn't think of this when I wrote the other post in this thread, but for EQ purposes you could possibly edit the tracks with Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). I know you can edit the curve on a song-by-song basis, adjusted it to pre-defined curves (bass-boost, etc), and load and save your own curves. The one thing I don't know is if you can do it in a batch...tell it to apply your EQ curve to 50 songs at a pop.

[fishtoprecords]

You mentioned in your initial post that you wanted to do it "once and for all" which means you really should not be thinking about mp3 formats.

To justify the effort of fixing the sound, with EQ, compression, etc. you really should be working on lossless files, i.e. flac. And to handle once and forever, you really should have two copies of your library of music. One is as ripped, using something like Accurip to make sure you got it right. Then another copy that you can run through EQ, multi-band compression, etc.

There are lots of flac2mp3 programs out there that will make a parallel copy of your flac files in MP3 format for non-critical listening.

Audacity can do it, its nice and open source. I used to use both Cakewalk Sonar and Syntrillian's CoolEdit. Before that I used Vegas, which started out more audio oriented than its current video editing style.

There are lots of programs to tweak audio.

I can't imagine that doing all of them in batches is a good idea, as it is unlikely that what is optimal for one song will work for another. Perhaps in a genre, say heavy metal or industrial, but if you throw in jazz or folk, you are going to want to do different things.

Note: Bearonica actually knows a ton about this stuff. She was a pro at it before she became a famous "in front of the camera" star.