wma normalisation?
 

Does anybody know of a program similar to mp3 Gain that will let me normalise wma files?

Do you want to normalize the file, or just the playback?

If you want to normalize the file, I'd say your SOL, Microsoft is a crapface when it comes to their encryptions.

Yes I need to normalise the file as I will be playing them back on a portable mp3 player that’s not clever enough to normalise on the fly. What if I convert the wma to wav, normalise them then convert them back.

Will there be any loss in quality as I’m not converting between codecs and the wma conversion process is far more standardized than the mp3 one.

should be ok, just make sure your using the exact same bitrate/codec.

There will be loss.

The way lossy compression works you lose quality every time you recompress.

Yeah, normalizing it will cut quality a little.

Not normalizing, recompressing.

You can't avoid it by picking the same codec and bitrate, every time you compress you add artifacts.

Thanks for all the replies. I guess I’ll have to experiment and be more careful when I rip stuff in future.

Yeah but you could decompress to wav and then imediately recompress to wma using the same bitrate/codec without losing quality, but changing the file by normalizing it and then recompressing would lose quality.

I'm not in a mood to argue, we agree.

Sorry, but you're wrong.

You will always lose quality.

(and I'm too tired to explain why right now :o)

shakey:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossy_compression

A lossy codec reshapes the sound signal to use less space. You can decode it to a wav but recompressing it again will run the same compressing alogitm over the sound signal that is now uncompressed, but already "fucked up" since lots of details are not present any more.
What transcoding (converting from another [lossy] format to another) results in is the loss of even more details of the signal. It's drinking coffee drained through several coffee filters. (duh, that was a bad example)

...and for some info on how ripping decent mp3-files, look no further, just click on this link:
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....postid=1513620