I'm new to digital sound editing, and I had a question or two for anyone experienced.
I'm a bit confused about audio levels in digital sound and clipping. When I rip music off of one of my CDs, the sound in the resulting wav file is at a particularly high volume. However, when I rip from another CD, when I look at the graphic representation of the song, I can tell that it is a much lower volume. Here is a screen shot:
You can see that the second song appears a lot quieter than the first. It sounds much quieter as well. Here are samples from the files:
So, why is it that commercial CDs can differ so much in level? Why is there not a standard for song leveling?
Also, even if I normalize the quieter song to 0 dB, it's still much quieter. If I increase the volume of the quieter song so that it audibly matches the volume of the other, I get all sorts of clipping.
The other song has what look like clipping as well, but not quite. Here is a close-up of a seemingly clipped peak:
As you can see, the peak isn't clipped flat as happens when I increase the volume of the second file. It has a more rounded clip with some kind of movement happening during the clip. How do they get this behavior? Is this how they get songs to be so loud without clipping? It doesn't sound bad. But, why overdrive like this?
Is there a way for me to get the second song to be as loud as the first without clipping?
