How can i adjust volume of my tracks with those in the iCloud?

Question

I recently activated iTunes Match for my music collection. Before that I had regained volume of all tracks to a quite low level. I use MP3Gain on windows with the default setting of "89".

On my PC/iTunes and on my iPhone I activated "sound check". iTunes has calculated the value for sound check. And it seems that the songs are level. However -- most of the songs on my PC are not yet updated from the cloud, they are still the originals. Maybe this is the reason why they are level.

When i play music with the iPhone the volume is very changing. I have loud songs (those which were matched) and I have very silent songs (those that needed to upload to the cloud).

This is very annoying. What can I do? Why does sound check not work on the iPhone? I would be content with regaining my songs to a higher level. But to wich one? And can I re-upload the updated files to the cloud?

Questions and questions ... any hints very much appreciated.

Edit: In the meantime I found out to wich level I must set my own songs. In MP3Gain the setting is "97". But this does not help very much because I am not able to re-upload songs to iCloud. Even if I delete a song from iTunes Match and make iTunes add it afterwards the song is not re-uploaded. It seems that the iCloud does not delete songs immediately and it does not recognize that a file has changed. The track will only be re-activated (or undeleted) with the old level. Sad, sad.

Answer 1

iTunes will not read the tags that MP3Gain uses to set the volume. iTunes stores Sound Check volume information in the iTunNORM tag.

If all of your music is in MP3 format, you could try qNormal.

However, if you've enabled iTunes Match and have a mix of MP3 and AAC files, you could try the commercial product beaTunes. It has a Windows version.

Both applications claim to calculate the appropriate volume using the open source ReplayGain algorithm that MP3Gain also uses.