by madmallard » Wed Mar 12, 2003 3:06 am
if you mean normalise a CD while you're burning a copy, not that i know of. you have to strip the wavs from it then burn it back onto a cd using a normalise filter.
as far as lame settings. .
think of wav-mp3 as a rendering process. Compression and rendering have similar concepts.
when you take a wav and compress it to mp3 you do so by using bitrates. the bit-rate is the equivalent of resolution. the quality setting determins the calculation power thrown at the overall file.
lame mp3 is in a sense a "smart compression"
analogy
you have a bitrate of 128kps set. now when you set the quality, you tell the pc how hard to look at the original before deciding how the compressed file will look. so if you set it at a low quality level, it will probably just asses the dynamic range of that particular millisecond of music, and take a mathematical average. big deal. but its very fast.
now if you set the quality level to higher numbers, then it starts doing fancy things like looking at the milliseconds around it, trying to make an algorhtm for the song based on the relative waveforms, volume levels, dynamic ranges etc etc etc. but all of those techniques means more math and therefore more cpu power to compress.
they play just fine, but one with higher quality settings but same bitrate CAN sound better then low settings.
this doesn't really apply at anything below 84 kps, tho unless its vocals only.