wavnorm - nplay - nrecord - what are they?
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wavnorm - automatically maximizes the level of a .wav file.
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nplay - simple text mode .wav file player.
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nrecord - simple text mode .wav file recorder, with level and clip monitor.
overview
What wavnorm does is find the highest level in a .wav file, and then scale
the entire .wav file so that the loudest point is as loud as possible
without clipping. It does this "in place" on the original .wav file, so
space consuming temp files aren't created. This is handy when creating
demo compilation CDs of home recorded material from different sources,
which can vary widely in levels. wavnorm can impose SOME degree of
consistency. nplay is a simple text mode .wav file player, with a vu meter
and a peak meter. It requires the newt user interface library that comes
with RedHat Linux. nrecord is a simple text mode .wav recorder, with a vu
meter and peak meter so it is easy to monitor the levels of the data being
recorded as it goes to disk. This greatly aids setting levels with a mixer
so optimum recording quality can be attained. It also makes use of the
newt library. These are available as C source code. wavnorm was developed
under RedHat 6.0 but should compile under any real operating system with
little or no modification. nplay and nrecord presume a Linux soundcard
interface and the newt libraries, so are probably more Linux specific.
why does the volume sound different even though the songs are all normalised?
Different recordings have different levels of dynamic range. Frequently in the recording process effects called compressors are used to control the dynamic range. This can make music sound loud. More info on this
here and
elsewhere on the web. The ecasound package
has a useful unix command line compressor that can be used for this.
news
17/7/2001
Made an rpm release. This required a minor tweak to the makefile but I didnt
bother increasing the version number. The tar.gz has the .spec file now as
well.
14/7/2001
A new release (0.5) is finally out. I have added a few minor improvements
of my own plus some patches sent in by people. Yes development has been slow,
sorry! But wavnorm is largely feature complete and I suggest ecasound for
more advanced audio operations.
Here is the Changelog.
download
source .tar.gz files
To install, do (as root):
tar xvzf wavnorm-X.tar.gz
cd wavnorm-X
make install
rpm files for RedHat 7.1 (should work on 7.0 as well)
links
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The Linux mp3 HOWTO gives wavnorm a mention, plus other useful info on digital audio software under Linux.
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ecasound - a useful command line tool for filtering, compression and other audio operations. Also with gui and interactive modes.
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cdparanoia - digital audio extraction tool for CD-ROM drives
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cdrdao - disk at once ripping, burning and other CDR related trickery.
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cdrecord - all purpose CD burning program for linux and other unixes.
- other similar projects to the xmms volume normaliser plugin, including the wavlevel program that is derived from wavnorm, and a few similar programs.