[MPlayer-users] 3-pass encodes with ogg vorbis?

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 06:09:20PM +0000, Goran Hane wrote:
> Just a thought, but why don't use normalize for audio-normalization, just
> run normalize audiodump.wav after the audio is extracted and then oggenc
> it?

NEVER blindly normalize audio. It will hurt quality severely if your
samples frequently go near +-32767, since frequency-space codecs
cannot reliably reproduce these values without clipping. If your
normalization program is smart enough to keep the peak sufficiently
below the limit, it's probably ok, but you should do double-blind
listening tests to confirm that the quality isn't reduced. IMO it's
MUCH safer to adjust volume at playback time rather than during
encoding. With ogg/vorbis you can even insert a tag in the file header
to automatically amplify the output.

Rich