Nero Express 10 VS. Sound Forge 10: RMS Normalization

[Gornot]

The one thing that has forced me (for years) to stick with Nero Express is it's feature to normalize audio files via RMS normalization.

I have been using the RMS method since Nero version 6 (if I remember correctly) because, first of all, I don't find ReplayGain dependable (IMHO); and second, it's useless to me because I can't use it on an MP3 player.

Through the years of using RMS I can now pretty much know exactly how much normalization I need to apply to a song in order to bring its volume up as much as possible before clipping. Simply normalizing using peak is completely worthless, because even on a same music album, different songs can have different peaks, and tweaking the normalization process numeous times before I get it right for each and every song would be a complete waste of time.

Recently I've gotten used to Sound Forge more than ever because I often find myself tweaking CDs I wish to rip... long silences, premature mixing cutoffs and generally low volume peaks. I'd import a CD into Sound Forge and mix all the songs to a single file, save them then burn them to ISO with Nero, usually applying RMS normalization of value 35, then mount the ISO and reimport the audio into Sound Forge and make my tweaks, also separating each song to a new .wav file then compressing them.

Let me just clarify that most of my music is metal, and that a value of 35 is, in most cases, seemlessly perfect because it doesn't just give me the loudest possible volume (without clipping) on my PC speakers, but also my MP3 headphones as well.

To be honest, I am tired of Nero and it's poor responce with my optical drive, as well as performance in Windows 7 in general, and I was thinking of replacing it with whichever software can burn .wav files into an ISO audio CD (which software, that's not relevant to this thread). But in order to do that I was thinking of finding a way to reproduce the same RMS normalization method in Sound Forge, so I could cut off most of my time I waste before I get the final rip onto my Music library.

I have tried everything to no avail. First of all, I have no clue what the value used by Nero is in the first place! Through Sound Forge I have only figured out that I need to use the equal loudness contour and avoid applying dynamic compression if the peak gets too high and clipping occurs after normalizing, but that's it.

I do hope that at least someone knows what the hell I'm talking about and suggest something, lol.

 

[molokaicreeper]

Audio Normalization in Nero 11

I am familiar with what you're talking about. I own Nero 11 but at this time I am having a horrible difficulty normalizing audio in a movie DVD I am making, for classic b/w cartoon shorts. I am trying to put 16-18 cartoons in each DVD for a total of 6 DVDs, which makes a total of around 100 cartoons or more. But who wants to edit the volume one by one? So I left the project alone for about 1 year now, and I decided to buy "Ashampoo Burning Studio", which offers to "normalize" audio in the video tracks, but I am left with the enigma on how to set the thumbs for the menu. Unfortunately, now I have the frustration that I need to take a snapshot of a suitable scene from each of the cartoon shorts, as the only way to edit the thumbs in Ashampoo is to choose an image in my computer. What a headache, you can never get everything in one package!

I wonder how you managed to normalize things in Nero, but my experience is that it is not automatic. So I am frustrated.