Need help on how to Normalize some OLD avi files

[davuswho]

I have several old avi files (like a tv series, home movies, etc) that were made with unknown and various audio and video software. They sound on them all very from very quiet to very loud. How can I normalize the sound on these?

I'm looking for a simple program that I can just drag them to it.. and let it do it trick... or if I have to use 2 or 3 programs that is fine. I just really want this issue taken care of.

Sorry if I posted this in the wrong forum, I couldnt exactly find one more appropriate for this topic

[Slogra]

IMHO the best solution in your case would be mp3gain (if your videos contain mp3). It will actually alter the volume in the mp3, without losing any quality!
Simply extract the mp3 sound from your video with say virtualdub. Use the mp3gain program to set the volume. Then import the mp3 into the avi again (make sure you use the same delay).
This will be manual work, but it's not that hard to do.

If you have hundreds of videos then it WILL be a lot of work :o. I don't believe a drag n drop utility exists.


Unfortunately, no good and easy solution exist for video files. However for audio files there is the awesome replaygain solution that i use all the time :cool:

[Blue_MiSfit]

As Slogra mentioned, mp3gain is a wonderful thing, but only if your audio is coded as MP3. If you have PCM, MP2, Vorbis, AAC, AC3 etc then you're probably looking at decoding all your audio files and transcoding them with eac3to.

Can you give some mediainfo dumps from these AVI files?

Here's what I would end up doing, roughly:
1) Extract all audio tracks using some kind of batch workflow, or by hand with ffmpeg or VirtualDub or something
2) If you have all MP3s - drop them all into Foobar2000, select them all, then right click and go to ReplayGain -> "scan per-file track gain". Let it do its thing, and then right click again, and this time select ReplayGain -> "Apply Track ReplayGain to MP3 Data"
3) If you have other formats, you could use a tool like eac3to to transcode the audio to some common format like AAC. Example (with a 2ch PCM WAV source):

eac3to input.wav output.m4a -normalize


You could also use foobar2000's batch transcode utility to do this.

It really all depends on what kinds of sources you have. Most mediainfo dumps, please!! :)

[yetanotherid]

I've not used it myself, but AVI Gain is designed to batch process the job of fixing volume levels in AVI audio for you. It extracts the MP3 audio and runs Replay Gain on it, then remuxes the AVIs. For MP3 audio it just changes the volume without converting.
For other types of audio I'm pretty sure it can convert it to MP3, then ReplayGain the MP3 it created and mux it into the AVI to replace the original audio.

AVIGain (http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/255147-Mini-Guide-Normalizing-Audio-for-Multiple-AVI-files)

There's a mini GUI for it here:
AVIGain GUI (http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/255147-Mini-Guide-Normalizing-Audio-for-Multiple-AVI-files?p=1942288&viewfull=1#post1942288)