xgrr.de – the whole not the half

In my last post I described the possibility to increase the maximum output volume on EU iPods (probably on others too but I guess they don’t have the silly 100db volume limit integrated). In my first trials I used a target volume of 103db because I read somewhere on the net that the US iPod outputs this as max volume. The volume increase wasn’t that dramatic. So I went even higher and am using 105db as target volume which does the trick for me.

To gain the best results follow this short manual:

1. Add the songs or directories you want to alter
2. If you have your songs organized in albums then select each album individually them, right click on them and select “Album Analysis” and repeat that for all your albums MP3Gain recognizes different folders as different albums automatically. This ensures that the overall album volume will be kept at the same level and you won’t get any tracks with a strange peak. If you only got scattered songs  skip to step 3
3. For songs which are not organized within an album simply select them, right click and select “Track Analysis”
4. Select all albums, right click and select “Apply Album Gain”
5. Select all lose tracks, right click and select “Apply Track Gain”

Now your songs should be significantly louder than before. And the most intriguing charme about all of this is that you can reverse it. MP3Gain creates two new tags within the MP3 to reverse the process if that is necessary in the future. Overall nice tool.

Obviously it is not possible to increase the maximum output volume of an iPod sold in the EU due to strange laws to protection of the listeners’ ears against damage. That said there is of course a solution to the problem. After wandering around on the net and finding absolutely NO working solution which can be achieved with built-in tools I found out about MP3Gain.

With MP3Gain it is possible to change the maximum output of an MP3 lossless. So no re-encoding required. I’m currently testing it with my iPod to check which is the best volume level for the iPod… So stay tuned!

When I got my iPod 5th generation a long time ago I wanted to convert my favourite series to the format of the iPod so I could watch them in the train. I looked around on the internet but every sofware I found was only trail or crap so I decided to make a GUI for ffmpeg.

A while passes since I wrote this code. And to be honest it’s real crap (the code). But it works. The current version is able to convert input videos to iPod and flv format. So you’re also able to make videos like YouTube (all you need is a flash player which can load flv files)

Try! Please give me feedback if you like it or don’t. If there are errors: tell me, then I’ll try to fix them.

Download petliCONVERTER 32bit Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

UPDATE: You can use this version for 64bit as well. You should replace the MediaInfo.dll in the application directory with the current 64bit version available on sourceforge.net.