Quiet CD track solution

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I was in the library borrowing some music and overheard the (adult) librarian asking for a CD cleaning kit because a library user had complained that the tracks on one of the CDs were very quiet...

uhhhh.....?

borrow the cd from the library, rip it onto the hard drive, use a .wav editor [there are many free ones at sharewaremusic.com] to bring up the volume of the one quiet track, then burn a new and improved cd. just a suggestion. don't violate copyright

There are programs that will take a group of MP3 files and "equalize" them so they all balance at a similar db level. Some will even adjust a file to a desired db level. Do note that db level is signal strength, not "volume." Weak signals are quiet because they need more amplification to be heard. Strong signals don't need much amplification. I've never understood why a CD would have variable db levels from track to track. Within a song, I could understand the highs and lows, but track to track can be an issue.

However, be careful if it's a MP3 collection. I literally have my MP3s in original ripped format and I copied all of them into a separate directory then used the equalizer program...just in case.

When I saw the thread title I imagined an entirely different problem, one that somewhat annoys me. There are some bands that have the last track of their CD about 3 or 4 minutes longer than the song itself and then they have a 30 second "micro-song" of guitar feedback or people laughing and chatting in the recording studio. It's annoying because when I'm listening to my ipod I need to stop what I'm doing and hand-advance the track or just wait out the silence. If I wanted silence, I wouldn't have put on my ipod.

The worst offender was, I think, Counting Crows. They had a track that was about 20 minutes long. There was a 3 minute song, then 15 minutes of silence, then another song. I would hand-advance the track but the second song is actually a very good song. It's not the usual guitar feedback or recording studio chatter. So If I want to hear this second song I have to wait out the 15 minutes of silence. Annoying!

I can't believe several recording studios would do this by accident (it's on several of my CDs) so I can only conclude the band thinks this is an artistic effect. I was hoping when I clicked on the thread that somebody had some sort of program that would snip out the silence, like the program that eqaulizes imbalanced tracks.

But no. It actually turned out to be a non-problem. Although the library should have a CD cleaner. It won't louden up the quiet tracks but library CDs are sometimes terribly filthy.

If you are using ipod, you can set the start and end time of a song in itune.