My imagination, or a real thing?

Billy Oxygen

Active Member
I have an option on Windows media player when burning a CD from a play list to "apply volume leveling across all tracks". Does this compress songs where the original recording was recorded at a higher level compared to other tracks on my play list?

I ask because after I burned a disc recently I then ripped it and played it back on the same system that I burned it from, and if you ask me it sounds different/compressed.

I do not know if this is my imagination or not. Help please.
 
Volume leveling does not compress anything. It shifts the volume level of the songs according to an algorithm, so that their volume - typically their average, RMS volume rather than the peak volume - sounds similar. But the dynamic range - the difference between the loudest and softest part of each song - remains unchanged.

While leveling doesn't create compression within songs, it certainly can alter the perceived sound and sound quality. By changing the volume of the songs relative to each other, it reduces the dynamic contrast between songs. Even if the songs did not originally come from the same album and you are leveling the volume to compensate for the fact that some songs were mastered louder than others, volume leveling also can make softer songs sound unpleasantly "in your face" and very loud songs sound a bit low and dull. In other words, the volume leveler has no idea if a given song is quiet because it's from an album that was mastered/pressed at a low volume level, or if the song is quiet because it's an acoustic ballad and is meant to sound quieter than other songs.

One way to deal with this is to have your music playback software volume level every album that you import into your music library. This way the software will look at the entire volume level of the album as a whole and adjust all tracks accordingly. This will make all your overall album volume levels the same, while still preserving the volume differences within each album. Then, if you take individual tracks and put them into a mix playlist or something like that, they'll have volume adjustments that correct for differences in mastering volume, but that don't accidentally overcompensate the volume adjustment based on the musical style or mood of an individual track.

One other potential sonic issue: in order to change the volume of a track, the software has to alter the digital data that makes up the track. And any alteration of the 1s and 0s can potentially change the sound in ways other than a pure volume change. In most cases these changes will be very minor and difficult to hear. But it certainly is possible that they can produce an overall slightly harsher or less refined sound than the originals.
 
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...it reduces the dynamic contrast between songs. Even if the songs did not originally come from the same album and you are leveling the volume to compensate for the fact that some songs were mastered louder than others, volume leveling also can make softer songs sound unpleasantly "in your face" and very loud songs sound a bit low and dull. In other words, the volume leveler has no idea if a given song is quiet because it's from an album that was mastered/pressed at a low volume level, or if the song is quiet because it's an acoustic ballad and is meant to sound quieter than other songs.

^^^ This, right here. tmtomh closes out the game with a home run in the bottom of the ninth. I'll append his statement by saying the same thing in a slightly different manner: the algorithm involved in volume leveling only increases or decreases the perceived volume (typically) +/- dB from the foundational level of the original track. So, if all tracks were adjusted to a uniform volume from their originally encoded loudness level, the "leveling" of volume simply cannot alter tracks that were initally lower or higher in loudness prior to an attempt to equalize their volume. Simplistically speaking, you'll have a group of soft, moderate, or outright loud tracks whose output will playback at a uniformly level volume with the same differential variable loudness inherent in the original tracks.
 
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