Digital Drive

Need Audacity expert

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This Post Has Been Edited by the Author

I'm normalizing gains on my existing digital music library using Audacity. I'm currently doing a project for each album one at a time. There may be a batch process available but I'm finding audacity doesn't preserve metadata so it appears I'm going to have to do each LP one at a time. Ie. 90% of the effort is going to be in preserving tags. This becomes a job that'll take me from 9 to 18 months working an hour or two a day.

But there may be better ways for me to go forward.

1.) Get Audacity to better handle the metadata for my project. Reducing having to fix any metadata is a big time saver for me. I'm losing album artist, discnumber and cover art. Audacity is changing track # (unless I'm careful and always creates single digit #'s instead of 01, 02,...,09) and renaming (song) Title to filename. It doesn't change filename but I'm using a discnumber+track# Title(song name) file naming convention and expect the metadata to match the filename.

2.) It would be faster if I could get Audacity to perform it's function on the whole library in a single step and create a shadow library with the hosed metadata for me to go fix before integrating the new files into my existing active project. The process of doing these one at a time manually increases the chances of errors. There are lots of steps, checking and double checking and a great potential for stupid errors that have to be fixed. There's 2700 albums and 1/2 half the time is spent making sure things aren't getting messed up and half that time is fixing them when they do. If there is a way get Audacity to do it's thing without my involvement it would be great.

3.) Suggestions?

4.) I wish Audacity would not change any metadata except whatever is required by it's processing. I could manually do an album in less than 1/2 time, probably music less. Maybe it does and I just don't see how to do it.

FWIW I've been using the amplify effect for a while when creating new albums for the digital library. But I need to equalize channel imbalances so I'm using loudness normalization instead. I like this as it assures reasonably consistent gains levels between all albums and "fixes" channel imbalances where gain adjustments weren't carefully made in the first place.

This makes a massive improvement in sound quality when listening to my digital music library and I'm going to spend the time to fix it. But if I can save time I'll be able to get around to taking photos of my collection and put them into the library and attach them to my database sooner.

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