How to make every track on a CD the same volume

Turn on normalise on the Audio CD page in Burn by Zaweba before you burn. Burn then adjusts the tracks so they play at a similar loudness, and you won't be reaching for the volume knob between songs. It works whatever format the music started in.

Uneven volume is the most common complaint about home-made compilation CDs. One song is quiet, the next one blasts out, and in a car it's more than annoying.

Why tracks differ in loudness

Music is mastered differently depending on when and where it was made. Recordings from different decades, albums from different labels and tracks from different sources all sit at their own levels. Inside one album the levels are usually matched on purpose. Put songs from ten albums on one CD, though, and those differences show.

Normalising looks at each track's loudness and adjusts it so they sit at a similar level. The music itself doesn't change, only how loud each track plays relative to the others.

Turning it on

Open a new audio CD from Home, Disc > Audio CD or File > New audio CD. Drag in your tracks: Burn reads MP3, FLAC, WAV, OGG, Opus, M4A and AAC, WMA, AIFF, APE and WavPack, decoding each with its own FFmpeg. Set the order by dragging or with the arrows, and turn on normalise. Check the minutes used against the disc, add CD-Text titles if you like, and burn.

When to leave it off

Normalising is ideal for mixes, party discs and car CDs. It's less suitable for a single album you're copying from your own files, because the quiet and loud tracks on a well-made album are often meant to be that way. A soft opening track or a big finale is part of the record. For a whole album, leaving normalise off keeps it as the artist intended.

Classical and live recordings deserve the same thought. Their range from quiet to loud is part of the music, and you'll usually want the gaps off too, so movements and live tracks run into one another without a pause.

Other things that help a mix

Burn takes care of format quirks on the way. Mono tracks are doubled to stereo so they come out of both speakers, surround files are mixed down to stereo, and gapless MP3 and M4A files are trimmed so they join cleanly. The two-second gaps between tracks can be on or off for the whole disc.

A quick test helps before you burn a stack of copies. Burn one disc, play it in the car or on the stereo it's meant for, and listen to the joins between songs from different albums. If the levels feel right there, they'll feel right on every copy, and you can make the rest with confidence.

Order matters as much as level. Grouping songs of similar pace, and leaving a quieter one between two loud ones, makes a disc easier to listen to from start to end.

With Check every disc after burning on, Burn checks the track list and each track's sound after burning. If you build playlists in Play by Zaweba, you can send one to Burn and it opens the Audio CD page with the tracks ready, so normalising a favourite playlist onto a CD takes a minute.