In article ,
Ian McCall wrote:
Hi - I originally posted this in uk.comp.sys.mac and was recommended to
try here as well.

Does anyone know if there's a utility to get average decibels from an
audio track, where 'an audio track' could mean wav, aif, mp3, or mp4
(as in I'd convert to whatever's necessary)?

Context: am trying to prepare a number of different music tracks to be
at the same level. It's my music so I have control over settings etc.,
but I've now listened to these so many times that I'm finding it hard
to be independent and quantitative about the situation.

What would be ideal would be a utility that could scan and do
min/max/avg. Icing on cake would be if it could also do histograms
(i.e. "of your five minute track, 90% is spent at this decibel range
with 5% being significantly more quiet and 5% being significantly more
loud). For cherries on top of the icing, it would be able to aggregate
these readings across multiple sound files (i.e. feed in the whole
album, eliminating the manual step of me trying to correlate the
results).

A meter to measure accuratly subjective average audio levels is the holy
grail. The broadcast lot claim to now have one - although you could have
fooled me, listening to much of TV.

However, it also depends on the type of music. If it has a wide dynamic
range, are you going to compress that? If not, it might be just levels
between tracks that stand out. And of course if a really heavy rock track
is followed by a ballad, levels alone won't smooth that out.

I'm afraid the best way to do things like this is by ear. ;-)

--
*Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.