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With the brief advice today we talk about music, or rather how to simplify a perennial problem of those who have a wide libreria MP3 in which each track is ripped to a different volume.

How many times has it happened to put our MP3 player playing and having random every time tinkering with the volume because a song “save“, and the other does not feel? The solution is, and is called MP3Gain. MP3Gain is a program open source whose sole purpose is leveling (the technical term is correct “normalize“) the output volume of an audio file. The interesting feature of MP3Gain is that it reduces or increases the volume of MP3s files without losing quality. In practice does not compress the file a second time (MP3 is a compressed format), but analyzes the spectrum of file, and alters a small part so as to increase or decrease the volume.

MP3Gain oggi, in addition to being a very known, is easy to use (despite the command line), and were also created for GUI for a more intuitive use (JavaMP3Gain, qtGain, etc..). The program is present in the main repository, and to install it we can launch our manager download, or by using the terminal under Debian, Ubuntu and derived simply run the usual command:

sudo apt-get install mp3gain

To RedHat, Fedora e derivate, instead we will launch:

sudo yum -y install mp3gain

Despite the GUI I think the command line infinitely faster. To adjust the volume of all the files in a directory simply navigate to the directory with the terminal and run this command:

find . -type f -iname '*.mp3' -print0 | xargs -0 mp3gain -r -k

All will be normalized to an MP3 optimum volume (enough so that the speakers of the computer does not gracchino).