Software of the Week: MP3Gain

Downloading music from the internet can be slightly frustrating. Not only you'll have to deal with slow downloading speed, your frustration sometimes may occur after a download. For example, I have a collection of MP3s on my laptop and the one thing that annoys me is the loudness of their audio output. The audio output of some songs are like mice squeaking and you'll have to increase the volume to hear its content. After the song ended and the player starts playing the next song, the speaker boomed so loud that sometimes i were genuinely stunned and immediately turn down the volume.

A typical problem when you are playing a list of MP3s with unbalanced volume output....my hands feel tired everytime i tried to reach for the volume knob.

Hoping to find a way to cure the problem on unbalanced audio output on every single MP3 i have, i started browsing the web for information. It is particularly difficult, but after a series of search, i came across this tiny software named MP3 Gain. It is developed by Sourceforge.net in late 2003 and released in early 2004.

MP3 Gain is a tiny software designed to balance out the volume of your music files. Simply put, MP3 Gain adjusts your MP3 so that all your MP3 have the same volume output. MP3 Gain's function is not to be confused with "normalizers software", where the software actually normalize an audio file's amplitude. Instead, MP3 Gain applies the "Replay Gain" algorithm developed by David Robinson to calculate how loud a file actually sound to the human ear and from there, it displays the amplitude of the file which then allows users to modify it in order to make an MP3 file sound louder or less louder.

The user interface of MP3Gain. It support drag and drop functions, and it is capable of analyzing unlimited amounts of MP3s simultaneously.

Another good thing about MP3Gain is that while it helps you increase or decrease the volume of an MP3, it does not encode and re-encode the audio file. Therefore, an MP3 with the audio amplitude adjusted through MP3Gain does not suffer audio degradation. The sound quality of an MP3 before and after adjustment are practically the same, regardless of its original file being good or bad in sound quality.

MP3Gain allows you to first analyze a track's amplitude, and then decide on whether to apply changes to an MP3's volume, or undo changes you've made to an MP3 and many more.

The software, albeit quite tricky at the start of use, can be real handy once you found out that one of your MP3 is too loud or too soft compared to the others. The best thing about it is that it is a freeware and thus, will never expire! It also works in all versions of Windows, even Windows 7! Apart from its slightly ugly icons and boring user interface, i have absolutely nothing to complain about this software...:)

To download MP3Gain now, click here.