What's some good software for normalizing the volume of a batch of mp3s?
 

I'm sure there are many programs that do this, so, if anyone here is using them, which one would you recommend? I need it for the Gamingforce CD Swap. Thanks in advance!

MP3gain is something I've started liking since it was suggested to me. It doesn't actually change the original audio in any discernable way. What it really does is adjust the volume that the MP3 is played at. If you really wanted to, you could make every song in your library play at a maximum of a specific decibel level.

Of course, because you might have different genres, piano tracks won't always sound the same volume as hard rock, and so on, so you may have to do some fine tuning. As a whole, it's a pretty pain-free program, though, and you don't have to worry about permanently clipping the source audio.

I'll second MP3gain, its strongest being (in my opinion) the fact, that it does no re-encoding.

But if it doesn't re-encode anything, will it still work if I burn the files to an audio CD?

Yeah it will still work and it keeps the target volume you set it too. It's a great program, highly recommended.

Okay then; thank you, e-buddies. I will try it out! :)

This is wrong.
If you indicate to write only replaygain tags then the authoring software has to honor this tags.
Thats not the case if you let mp3gain modify the gain-value in the mpeg frames, which does in fact alter the audio data stream, but is a lossless process, when you somewhere store the original gain value. Then gain change works everywhere, but is limited to a single setting (compared to three settings when considering real replaygain feature).

I tried using MP3gain in the past but it didn't seem to work. What I did would select all the songs that I wanted it to normalize so that I could make a mix CD and then used one of its preset options to normalize all the songs in relation to each other, but it always came out sounding the exact same when I compared the softer songs to the more hard rock songs. What options do you guys use or how to you make it work for you? If you can provide some screenshots that would be helpful too. Thanks.

replaygain is not normalizing. Read again what replaygain does for you. This is a frequent misunderstanding. If you want to normalize your tracks then use a normalizer, not a replaygain tool.

I didn't know that there even existed presets. What kind of presets do you mean?

What do you mean? That replaygaining didn't change the output level of the data? Does your player support replaygain tags? Have you thought about direct manipulation of the mpeg stream?

I use foobar2000 to replaygain tag my files and then play them in audiophile/album mode. Under gentoo linux I use audacious with bmp-mad, also in audiophile mode.