Raising audio volume with MeGui?

[killerteengohan]

I have a movie and the volume is quite low and very hard to hear. Sometimes you hear loud sounds or just loud enough sounds then the talking afterwards is so low you cant make it out. You can hear it with the volume maxed but then you hear a hissing sounds from the speakers being turned up so loud.

I usually just turn on the Normalize Peaks and thats always made the volume louder for me.

I am using it now and it raises the volume a tiny bit, but its hardly enough to make the talking audible. I can still barely hear the talking at all.

Is there any other option or way to raise the volume with MeGui?

I would just use Goldwave and make a higher volume MP3 but I want the audio to be AAC the way MeGui makes them with my chosen settings.

Any suggestions?

[newpball]

If the normalize peaks does not help it means that the soundtrack has a high dynamic range, which is generally a good thing. But if you cannot hear the soft passages you have no alternative but to compress the sound.

[killerteengohan]

I'm already compressing the sound by making it AAC from AC3 with normalize peaks turned on arent I?

[newpball]

I'm already compressing the sound by making it AAC from AC3 with normalize peaks turned on arent I?

Well you are talking about compressing the whole audio stream I was talking about compressing the dynamic range of the audio, e.g. increasing the loudness of the audio.

See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

[davexnet]

If you look at the peaks in an audio editor, you can see without ambiguity what's going on.

[killerteengohan]

Would raising dB hurt any?

[hello_hello]

There's always the possibility there's simply something wrong with the audio. I've seen audio where the channels somehow ended up in the wrong order (generally someone else's re-encoding), or there's channels missing (ie the centre channel where all the dialogue tends to be) or it was downmixed to stereo with the channels downmixed incorrectly etc. It's possible to end up with the rear channels in the front, the centre channel and the LFE channel swapped.... well anything's possible and it sounds like maybe something like that happened in your case.

[hello_hello]

Would raising dB hurt any?

If MeGUI is normalising, the loud peaks will already be at maximum. Increasing the volume further will no doubt cause them to clip (distort). You'd need to compress the loud parts with an audio editor and then you could raise the over-all volume, but it really sounds like there's something wrong with the audio.