I have a bunch of MP4 music video files with different volumes and looking for a quick easy way to normalize them. Is there a free program do it within windows?
App to Batch Normalize Audio in MP4 Files?
figarow on 11/12/2022 - 14:19
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No the remote has buttons.
Watch them on youtube instead?
I can't normalize youtube, uploaders are notorious for breaking the rules.
It doesn't recognize MP4 files, from my list it only saw one of them, I assume it was the only one that had MP3 audio. Almost all of the audio is AAC.
"Now MP3Gain should handle AAC files (. m4a or . mp4). Please note that aacgain will not work on DRM-encoded files (i.e. music you buy from the iTunes store)."
I use MP3gain for MP3's and just a tip, if you do large files like long mixes it looks like it freezes and shows (Not responding) but don't worry it's actually still working in the background, just leave it alone for a minute or two and it will successfully finish.
I also leave it on the Replaygain normalization which is default. Not the peak normalization mode which is more common.
If you can use a CLI try ffmpeg:
https://superuser.com/a/323127
https://github.com/slhck/ffmpeg-normalize
(lots of other helper scripts around too)Yeah, I'd be doing it in ffmpeg. As we speak I'm working on a powershell script heavily involving ffmpeg so I'm pretty far into the weeds with this but it's not for everybody.
OP could try https://ffqueue.bruchhaus.dk/ which is a GUI wrapper. I haven't used it myself, but it does support the ffmpeg normalize. What you really want is an option which will copy the video stream unchanged, and only recode the audio. It was the first result that game up for "ffmpeg GUI normalization" but OP would probably not have known what to look for.
Foobar2000 can calculate the ReplayGain and then depending on the app to use to playback, the volume will be normalised. Be wary of actually adjusting the volume as it will cause the files to be recompressed and you'll lose quality.
I've used Box4 https://www.videohelp.com/software/BOX4 which is freeware and has an audio normaliser.
Harder to use than mp3gain, but it works on MP4 files.In addition to what I and others have said above, be aware that normalization is not the same as equalizing the perceived volume level. This is a much more complicated problem and involves average volume over time and the difference between the quietest and loudest bits of the audio. That is not the same as simply 'normalizing' which is meerly looking for the loudest sample and making sure that peaks at or near 0db.
If you remember TV… how the commercials sound much louder than the program. Both are normalized to the same volume, but the ads sound louder because their average sound energy over time is much higher than the TV program (Unless it's a heavy metal concert or something).
iTunes and Spotify actually do a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure that music 'sounds' a similar volume, and iTunes/iPod used to offer a feature to do this for you back in the day for music you ripped yourself (though properly ripped CD audio should have been mostly fine anyway). YouTube OTOH does a pretty bad job of this. They will adjust loud videos down in volume behind the scenes, but don't seem to do the reverse with quiet videos.
If you've just 'acquired' a random collected of music videos, simply normalizing the audio is not likely to solve your problem, though it might help a little bit. You could be amplifying a bunch of noise too. If that video is noticeably softer than other videos, chances are the audio quality is dodgy and simply normalizing it is likely to exacerbate any other issues the audio has.
Maybe there is a video player with a loudness compensation feature, that's more likely to give you what you really want.
Great advice, thanks!
Audacity.
Use the Amplify tool (it will automatically calculate an amount) then use Loudness with a LUFS of -16.
You may be able to batch (https://garrysblog.com/2021/04/12/batch-processing-files-wit…) but I haven't tried it before.
It can certainly load MP4 Video files, and can batch process. But I'm not sure if will batch process the audio and write it back to a video file.
But yeah, amplify to a given LUFS is what OP really wants to do.
Edit: You need ffmpeg to enable Audacity to open a MP4 file. FWIW it won't open a MKV file.
Thanks, my bad. Missed the ‘video’ part. 🤦♂️
I've been using Hybrid for years. Never needed to batch-normalise streams, but this can do it. Assume it will be by one set value for all files though.
https://www.selur.de/1GB is a bit punchy, I'm still using 2018.02.03.1 with installer size of 255MB.
Volume knob?