Classical music in your car
I’ve written a plugin, designed to be used with the free audio editor Audacity, that makes it easier to listen to classical music, or other music that has a wide range of volumes, at low volumes or in high noise conditions (such as in your car) so that you can still hear the soft parts.
For a long time now, I’ve listened to classical music less than I might like to. A lot of that is because listening to classical music is hard. You have to turn the volume up to hear the soft parts, and then either turn it down when it gets loud or have it be loud enough to be distracting (or painful). For instance, in the car, there’s a lot of noise from the road, so even at normal volumes it can be difficult to hear some of the soft parts. And some albums and songs are so quiet that many players can’t be turned up loud enough to hear the music, even in quiet conditions!
I’ve sort of put up with this problem for a long time, but it really hit home how inconvenient it is the other day when I was driving with some friends. I changed my mp3 player to some Debussy piano solos (from his Children’s Corner suite, really nice stuff) and tried to play some of it for them. Well, it failed pretty miserably. It was so quiet, even with the volume all the way up, that you couldn’t even hear anything below a mezzo-piano, and the tape adapter was already so noisy (not to mention the harmonic distortion) that enjoying the music was basically impossible. And I realized: if only this music were as loud as normal music, they probably would have really liked the tracks. So the low volume of those songs actually turned two people off of classical music. What a shame!
Go to the project page.
