[MPlayer-users] Re: Best way to dump pcm to a wav and ogg, ogm support

[D Richard Felker III]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 03:52:03AM +0100, Tobias Diedrich wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]

> D Richard Felker III wrote:
> 
> > I advise against normalizing sound. Frequency-space codecs don't seem
> > too fond of waveforms that actually take on the peak values (+-32k);
> > when prenormalization is used, the vorbis encoder will often generate
> > a bitstream that's much lower quality than when encoding the original
> > input, and the decoded output will have samples that go over 1.0
> > (32k), resulting in nasty clipping. I could speculate about the
> > mathematics of why this happens, but it seems best just to avoid
> > normalization and adjust your volume knob as necessary.
> 
> normalization != volume maximization

It very well can be (depending on what norm you're using), and I have
no way of knowing what Bunkus had in mind. A friend of mine encoded
nearly a gig of streaming-bitrate oggs only to find out afterwards
that the quality was trashed by stupidly 'normalizing' them all to hit
peak volume. :(

Rich