help me please....

[Guinness]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to this and have just been experimenting with some of my DVD's by converting them to DivX..

used SmartRipper, FlaskMPEG and DivX Pro 5.0 Codec.

All went fine, took about 3 1/2 hours to encode but first off the sound was way too quiet, I corrected this by making the Normalization in the Audio Player 400% and now whenever the volume is loud or has any kind of explosion or bang it distorts really badly.. Do you think this is due to it being at 400%?

I used use the MPEG Layer-3 audio codec at 128 kbps, 48,000 Hz and obviously the DivX 5.0 video codec.

anyone got any ideas why my audio is not happy at all....

[Mirror_Image]

the sound was way too quiet, I corrected this by making the Normalization in the Audio Player 400% and now whenever the volume is loud or has any kind of explosion or bang it distorts really badly.. Do you think this is due to it being at 400%?

Normalize only goes to 100% (0dB). I think what you did was to put a 400 in the "change volume" box (not the box that pops up when you hit the 'normalize" button). if you increased the volume 400%, that would probably make the sound horribly distorted (a.k.a. "way in the red") much of the time.

[Guinness]

I was in the Run > Audio Player

Ticked the normalization tick box in there and set that to 400%

just clicked the Search box to let Flask set the % and it set it to 219%.

I'm still a bit confused by this..... would I be better off doing the audio seperately using lame?

thankyou for your help!

[DrChumley]

I was in the Run > Audio Player

Ticked the normalization tick box in there and set that to 400%

just clicked the Search box to let Flask set the % and it set it to 219%.

I'm still a bit confused by this..... would I be better off doing the audio seperately using lame?

thankyou for your help!

Normalizing the sound will search through the waveform, find the highest peak, and increase the amplitude (the volume) of the entire wave to set the peak at the percentage you set. The percentage is not a percentage in terms of the wave form itself (i.e., 400% percent of the original volume.) Rather, it is a percentage of the highest number of decibles possible. 100% is the highest volume level you can get without getting distortion or clipping. Anything over 100% will be disorted. Therefore, if you jack the highest peak up to 400%, you will also jack up all the rest of the waveform, likely causing a lot of clipping.

You can normalize the file to 100% without getting clipping. If that's still not loud enough, you'll need to handle the audio in a seperate program that can "compress" and/or "maximize" the sound. I use Steinberg's Wavelab at my recording studio for that, but it's a very expensive program. There are several programs available that can do rudimentary compression that should work for what you want to do.

DrC