Winamp, Windows Media Player or what? Windows compatible audio players.

[JLNorthGA]

Free or cheap is good (no budget - well maybe $40) - I'm using Multiplay for sound cues. We have a Windows based laptop.

Need to play multiple songs. Would be nice to have them all at the same volume without having to go to the laptop between tracks. We do have ASCAP and BMI licenses for both live and recorded music - no SESAC as of yet - but we usually don't play SESAC artists and haven't had any of them perform as of yet.

We have been using Windows Media Player - which probably isn't the best choice. We aren't doing any video - only audio. Would like to have all the music at the same level.

 

[CrazyTechie]

You should be able to do this within Multiplay. If you right click on a cue and select "Cue Properties" it will pull up the Cue Properties dialog box. To get the cue to fire the cue after it all you need to do is change the drop down box under "Action" to say "Start Play" and make sure that the drop down box under "Target" says "Next Cue" If you do this for all the cues that you want to fire simultaneously it should fire them all after you fire off the first one.

You can also adjust the output levels of each audio cue within the properties of each cue. It may take some playing, but you should be able to get them to be all the same or similar level.

 

[cpf]

iTunes has "sound check" which will automatically tweak the volumes of your tracks to be more consistent. Never used it, but it's something to try.

 

[CrazyTechie]

iTunes has "sound check" which will automatically tweak the volumes of your tracks to be more consistent. Never used it, but it's something to try.

Good thought, although it does appear that you can't actually encode this new audio level into the sound file itself.

Coming from iTunes: About Sound Check

This data is stored in either the "normalization information" ID3 tag or the iTunes Music Library database. The audio data in your music files is never changed.

 

[neotrotsky]

You should be able to do this within Multiplay. If you right click on a cue and select "Cue Properties" it will pull up the Cue Properties dialog box. To get the cue to fire the cue after it all you need to do is change the drop down box under "Action" to say "Start Play" and make sure that the drop down box under "Target" says "Next Cue" If you do this for all the cues that you want to fire simultaneously it should fire them all after you fire off the first one.

You can also adjust the output levels of each audio cue within the properties of each cue. It may take some playing, but you should be able to get them to be all the same or similar level.

Multiplay is the way to go, as CrazyTechie mentioned. iTunes is a poor choice when it comes to media players on Windows considering the automations you will find in Multiplay, and you can't beat the price!

 

[bishopthomas]

I typically use iTunes for music and VLC for video. That's just basic playback, though, never tried any kind of "look-ahead" normalizing feature. If I'm playing a wide variety of songs from various sources I'll put a hard limiter on the channel.

 

[dbaxter]

It's work, but you could normalize all your sound files with the free Audacity beforehand. If you are ripping CD's - the free CDEX program will normalize them as it goes. For playback, there is a free version of my Cue Player program.

 

[Van]

I say use Audacity, like dbaxter suggested, to normalize the file then play back with whatever you like. I'm a fanboy of Winamp from WAY back but I have to say I've been getting less and less enamored with them in the years since AOL bought them. If it's an 'On the fly' solution you are looking for then you might want to try VLC which is a video player but which has a 'normalize audio playback' filter built in. VLC is a great program with functions a lot of others don't have including the ability to stream from a server etc.

 

[JLNorthGA]

You should be able to do this within Multiplay. If you right click on a cue and select "Cue Properties" it will pull up the Cue Properties dialog box. To get the cue to fire the cue after it all you need to do is change the drop down box under "Action" to say "Start Play" and make sure that the drop down box under "Target" says "Next Cue" If you do this for all the cues that you want to fire simultaneously it should fire them all after you fire off the first one.

You can also adjust the output levels of each audio cue within the properties of each cue. It may take some playing, but you should be able to get them to be all the same or similar level.

I'm using Multiplay for the sound cues. I'll definitely use it for the curtain call music and any music in the show. I'm not so sure about using it for the preshow and intermission music as that may be variable - and I'm not quite expert enough to switch show cue files on the fly.

 

[CrazyTechie]

I'm using Multiplay for the sound cues. I'll definitely use it for the curtain call music and any music in the show. I'm not so sure about using it for the preshow and intermission music as that may be variable - and I'm not quite expert enough to switch show cue files on the fly.

You can insert a playlist cue, it is the icon that looks like a bunch of folders. When you edit the cue you can insert a bunch of different audio files and it will play through them all, you can loop it as many times as desired. So if intermission were say 10 minutes, I would put in 15-20 minutes worth of music in the cue and have it loop at least once just to be on the safe side. The trick with these is in order to end them when you want you will need to insert a control cue that fades out this playlist cue.

From my experience with Multiplay, the playlist cue type hasn't played too nicely with .mp3 file types, so I've always used .wav files instead, YMMV. To do a batch convert of all the files I've found doing it in iTunes to be easiest as you can place all the files into a playlist and then select all of them, then convert them to .wav files. If you need me to go over how to do this in more detail let me know and I'll post it.

 

[TimmyP1955]

SoundCheck, Normalization, whatever MediaMonkey calls it - they don't work well at all. A song that has no dynamic range (a volume wars victim) will still sound louder than a song that was well done (dynamics left intact). The best way is to adjust the volume level of each song in Multiplay. Second best is compression (with carefully chosen attack and release times).