Column: Fixing Music Download Volumes

-- Q: I've downloaded music onto my computer from various sources, and some songs sound a lot louder than others. Why is that, and how can I make them play at the same level?

A: It's not your imagination that some recordings are louder than others, and it's not your fault that you have to tweak the volume knob every time the song changes.

Most newer music, especially pop music, plays a lot louder than music recorded 20, 10, or even 5 years ago. The reason is what audiophiles call the loudness wars. The music industry has been waging a volume arms race of sorts, making each recording louder than the last in hopes it will stand out from the rest to get airtime and sell copies.

Audio mastering engineer Bob Katz of Digital Domain said CDs made today are about 16 decibels higher than those made in 1980, or about four times as loud.

Turning down your volume doesn't completely solve the problem, because the music isn't just louder _ it's "compressed." This means that within a song, everything is cranked up as high as possible, so there's barely any difference between the quiet sounds and the loud sounds.

"Recent CDs _ Madonna, Britney Spears _ are not only recorded loud, they're recorded so loud that they're distorted," said Steve Lyman, senior broadcast engineer at Dolby Laboratories. He explains it this way: If Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" were recorded like most pop music is today, the cannon fire wouldn't come as a surprise.

Furthermore, there's no proof that recording songs louder and more compressed boosts sales or airtime, said Glenn Meadows, media services director for Sheridan Square Entertainment and a mastering engineer who's worked on over 800 gold and platinum albums and CDs, including those of Jimmy Buffett and Shania Twain.

Meadows said that once, he defied a client's promoters by shipping an uncompressed version of a song to the radio stations. The client, which Meadows would only identify as a "multiplatinum-selling artist," got great airtime, he said, and the song sounded better because of it.

But the backlash against the loudness wars has been small, and the reason is twofold: the technology the average consumer uses to listen to music (cheap earphones, car stereos, computer speakers) and the environment in which they listen (on the treadmill, in traffic, while chatting online). Most people simply aren't paying attention to sound quality.

"In today's world, we listen to music in the background, we listen to stuff on shuffle mode, and there's the tendency to want everything to be homogenized, so it sounds the same. But in the real world, it doesn't sound like that. Records get quiet. Songs get quiet in the verses, they get loud in chorus _ it's part of the emotion of music," Meadows said.

If you want your new music to have the same dynamic variation as your old music, there's not much you can do; with today's technology, the average consumer can't add texture that's not there.

But you can save yourself from blowing out your eardrums when your MP3 list switches from a 1985 recording of "How Will I Know" by Whitney Houston to a 2005 recording of "My Humps" by The Black Eyed Peas.

The closest thing to a solution at this point is "normalizing" software, which essentially adjusts the volume for you.

If you use iTunes or an iPod, try the Sound Check function.

"From the point of view of the average consumer, Sound Check is probably a good thing ... It's a better-than-nothing solution," Katz said.

If you use Windows Media Player, the program should apply the Volume Leveling function for you automatically.

There's also volume-adjusting software out there such as Replay Gain, Katz said, versions of which can be downloaded for free from various Web sites. But at this point it's still being improved upon, and is only compatible with a few music players, including Winamp. Try it if you're interested, but back up your music files just in case.

A more labor-intensive solution is going through your entire MP3 collection and adjusting each song's volume setting individually, according to your preference.

Katz said it's best to turn down the loud songs to the level of the quiet songs, rather than the other way around, to minimize distortion. You can always turn up the volume knob on your speakers later.