DIY Life

Living in the year 2008 probably means you have quite a bit of your music collection in digital form instead of a huge rack of CDs taking up wall space. If that's the case, you might have noticed that the volume level between all those digital MP3 files can be unnerving when you're trying to listen to music when you throw a party or even when jogging with that small player on your arm.

Although Apple iTunes features automatic noise leveling, some of us prefer to use a non-Apple solution to really make our entire collection of MPs music sound all decent at the same volume -- without constantly fiddling with volume controls. If you've purchased CDs to rip those MP3 files from, and you've downloaded other music from the web, and you've collected MP3 files from friends, you probably have wildly fluctuating volume levels on all those music files.

A tool I recently used -- and can't recommend enough -- is the freely available MP3Gain. The smart little program will shuffle through all your music files (hopefully, they are all in MP3 format) and will set them all to a specific volume level that you set. In other words, it will "normalize" your MP3 collection. The software is self explanatory once you download it and use it. You'll be glad you did -- I sure was.