Audacity tracks not at the same "volume"

DriftRoot · Post by **DriftRoot** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 2:12 pm

I've been slicing and dicing with Audacity for years and I've never run into this problem. I've got a song here I'm mucking around with and the second audio track I import is consistently playing at a lower level than the first track. It's apparently JUST this song - I tested some others without a problem.

Thinking maybe it was just Audacity, I exported a section of the spliced song and opened it up in WMP. Sure enough, it plays back the same way - what was on the first track is noticeably louder than what was on the second.

Both waveforms look exactly the same in the original Audacity project file. Bearing this in mind, I brought this test section back into Audacity and discovered that the waveform of the spliced file reflects the change in "volume" - it looks similar to what would happen if I had normalized the first track and left the second track alone. The waveform is HUGE for the first track part and but normal for the second.

Thoughts? Suggestions? I can't just try ripping the song again because I don't have the CD anymore. I also don't really want to normalize the audio and make everything "equal" that way because the song doesn't need it and really comes out sounding rather poor.

DriftRoot · Post by **DriftRoot** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 6:10 pm

*correction: Normalizing the audio on the final file does not resolve the problem. It's still quite obvious track 1 is ... louder (for lack of a better word) ...than track 2.

DriftRoot · Post by **DriftRoot** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 6:30 pm

Ok, in the interest of helping someone else who may run across this problem...

Something on my computer decided, fairly recently, that it didn't like those files, a whole bunch of them that I'd ripped about three months ago from a variety of CDs. Maybe the files themselves were iffy to begin with, but I kind of doubt it because none of them gave me any hassle until now. (I couldn't even work with them in BeSweet today - all I'd get was synch errors in my log and invalid WAV files.)

In any case, I loaded the files up in Audacity, exported them as mirror image WAV files and now the "new" WAV files work in Audacity and in BeSweet. Let's hope this is case closed, even if it was never solved.