Loudness/volume adjustments to MP3 files

[CelticWhisper]

Hoping someone can point me in the right direction as frustration is beginning to get the better of me.

Basically what I want to do is apply loudness adjustments to MP3 files for in-car listening. The responses I've seen to other people asking this have been in the vein of "it causes clipping," "songs are already mastered too loud," "replaygain works the other way, it brings loudness down to a lowest common denominator," etc.

Bearing in mind that this is A. already going to be a crappy listening environment with road noise, horns, wind, etc.; B. I'm listening to prog. and symphonic metal that does have dynamic range that, oddly, I guess I actually do want to eliminate for the purposes of not having to mess with volume while on the freeway; and C. given that I've already fought with ReplayGain and have at least a basic idea of what it does...these reponses haven't got me very far. Hoping my fellow Neowinians can give me something better.

So...what do I need to do to achieve this? Is ReplayGain not even the right tool? Do I need to adjust it from the default 89dB target point? Is there another application I should be using?

Right now I'm fighting with a combo of MP3 files with a default application of RG, various PC-side audio players/metadata editors, and a Sansa Clip+ that also has a ReplayGain adjustment setting of its own.

I realize that I'm posting while ****ed off and thus am likely being rash in wanting a quick fix, but at the same time I learn by doing and would kind of like to see (or hear) some noticeable results to get an idea of how to do what I want to do.

Thanks in advance for the help.

[jnelsoninjax]

I use a 4 step process to do what you want to do:

1. I convert the mp3 to WAV

2. I then use WavTrim to trim any excess silence from the beginning and end of the wav

3. I Then use a command line program called Normalize which does exactly what you are hoping to do, it analyzes the wav file, then either increases or decreases the over all volume of the file.

4. I use a LAME GUI called All2Lame which requires that you have LAME on your system, which can be downloaded here

5. (optional) use a tag program to create the IDV3 Tag on the MP3 files.

[RATiO]

i use audacity. the amplify effect auto chooses the best amount to avoid clipping

[Draconian Guppy]

replay gain in dbpoweramp is the way togo. But alas, audacity has a simple toggle to make the track "louder".

Trying to get to the source, how are you conecting to your car stereo? Aux? Bluetooth? USB?

[n_K]

Use MP3gain, there's a windows and mac frontend, might even be one for linux too.