iVolume for OS X
December 6th, 2006I love iTunes, but let’s face facts. Sound check, the feature that is supposed to make sure that the volume of all the tracks in my entire library are normalized, is less than stellar in it’s execution. It’s particularly noticeable when listening to the adjusted songs on the iPod, or through my new Alpine CDE-9852 head unit with iPod integration. In the past few weeks I’ve been enjoying the integration of my iPod and my car stereo, I’ve been blown away more times than I’d like to remember by an extremely loud song following a quiet one.
That’s where iVolume comes in. iVolume takes the currently selected tracks from iTunes and can either normalize them as a group or adjust each of their volume levels to a consistent decibel output. The best part is that iTunes will use those volume adjustments to burn CDs and transfer songs to the iPod.
The only downside to iVolume is that it cannot adjust volume levels of tracks purchased from the iTunes store, mp3s without ID3 tags (or old ID3 tags), or tracks imported by old versions of iTunes where the volume information was stored in the library and not in the file itself.
Personally, the greatest challenge in using iVolume is that while it’s fairly quick, nothing is fairly quick when you’re doing it to 50,000 tracks imported from a large CD collection over a period of 5 years. But it the end, after a week of processing, it will be worth it. I’m looking forward to a much more peaceful morning commute, free from the surprises of dramatic shifts in iPod volume.