Normalize A Track For CDJ’s?
Probably a ridiculous question but out of curiosity, does anyone use mp3gain to normalize a track before burning the tracks to a cd or to a USB stick?
I would think most better CDJs have either auto-gain or you adjust it yourself. Few tracks have lower signal, mostly album ripoffs from the seventies/eighties when we had no volume wars.
whenever i’m burning a CD, there’s a normalization feature on the program.
What program do you use?
I use Roxio
oh and to be safe, do not run anything other than the burning software alone.
I used to multitask while burning CDs, no matter how branded the blank cd there’s always fault & failed burning process.
I use Platinum Notes. A little pricy but worth it in my opinion.
mp3gain doesn’t normalize. normalizing means making the absolute signal peaks equal across tracks. mp3gain instead tries to adjust the loudness which is different.
practically, i would neither normalize nor mp3gain my tracks. i wouldn’t normalize because all modern tracks come normalized already. it’s done during mastering. i wouldn’t run tracks through mp3gain. for one, it’s inaccurate. for another, i prefer to simply adjust the gain on the mixer. i feel that from looking at the meter and from pre-listening to the track, i can better judge what’s the right gain.
this is your contribution to this thread? i got a smiley for you as well: 
and i got a smiley for you: 
trololol. if patch disagrees with what i wrote, he should explain why. my argument is not a ridiculous one.
if i made an outrageous point, i would have symphathies for patch responding with sarcasm. but i didn’t. my argument is well-founded. it has to do with how mp3gain functions (specifically, it can adjust the volume of mp3s only in 1.5dB steps).
Normalized tracks are good for us who use vintage mixers with no gain control and PFL. Back in the 80s, the output volume from vinyl was very consistent. Sure, there were a few records that were louder than the majority. But not like the MP3s out there today. Volume is all over the place.
apparently, you’re one more person in this thread who doesn’t understand the difference between peak volume (or, more precisely, measures of maximum amplitude) on the one hand and loudness (=perceived strength of sound) on the other hand.
the mp3s out there today do not differ in terms of their peak volume. they all have absolute peaks very close to 1 (very close to 0dB full scale). thus, normalizing those mp3s to 0dBFS doesn’t do a thing because they’re all very close to 0dBFS from the outset.
however, they differ in their loudness. human are well-capable of ordering those mp3s from quiet to loud and they will find the difference between quieter ones and louder ones to be quite significant.
when mixing, you want to match tracks’ loudness. if you wanted to match tracks’ peak volume instead, you would hardly ever move the gain knob. (or, in traktor, you could turn autogain off.) once again, peak volume of virtually all modern tracks is very close to 1 already, there would be no need to make any adjustments.
let me give you an example of what i wrote above.
here are a few of the tracks i most recently added to my collection (all are lossless).
marco & orpheo - mach 4. peak: 0.999878
hardrive - deep inside. peak: 1.000000
dj qu - rainy daze. peak: 1.000000
dj pierre - love trax (distorted luv - wild pitch side). peak: 1.000000
skatebård - love in the night. 1.000000
as you can see, all of these tracks peak extremely close to one. they are all within 0.1dB peak level to one another. yet, any DJ would agree with me that gain staging is necessary when mixing these tracks. that’s because the tracks differ substantially in loudness.
I agree with psychonaut, I don’t see why one would normalize files. There’s gain controls on virtually any mixer used today (and for the “vintage mixer” argument - can you really think of a setting in which there would be CD players but a mixer without gain pots? Btw, I’m using a Rodec MX-180 Mk2, not exactly the newest mixer around either) and adjusting the gain needs pretty much no extra time while cueing.
Thanks for the technical insight. Unfortunately, I don’t really get all technical. I just play music and hear what happens. I started mixing MP3s using Serato and a Numark 1975. Crossfading from one channel to the other was usually an abrupt volume change. Sounded crappy. Maybe it was poorly ripped MP3s. Running my library through Platinum Notes seemed to help a lot.
say I have 2 tracks playing and on the meter of my mixer, I tuned the channel gains so they’re both at 0db. Sometimes 1 track is either louder or softer, why?
use the gain knob on the mixer to adjust.
I do. What I was saying is, sometimes these meters arent accurate 
“Us who use vintage mixers” should know that the faders on the mixer are more than simple on/off witches and that channel faders don’t have to be slammed all up to the top.
When mixing with a rotary mixer for example, you would usually set your channel faders to maybe seven for your average track. This would give you plenty of headroom if you wanted to play a track that wasn’t mastered that loud. If you had a louder record you just left the fader at maybe between 6 and 7. Same can be done with the usual channel faders.
If you’re crossfadermixing, use the crossfader for the relative volume of the two tracks and the channel faders of the absolute loudness of the channels.
That’s because (perceived) loudness hast nothing to do with the peak levels your meters show you. The peak lever meter shows you, how loud the loud the loudest part of your records is. How loud the track is perceived depends on its average volume (root mean square / RMS-) level.