How to control the playback volume of a particular sound when playing it in openAL or Finch?

Question

I may play several sounds at the same time, and some of them are louder or more silent than others. Because I am very lazy and don't know a lot about audio editing tools, I would just want to adjust the volume of the sounds programmatically so that they all match nicely. I believe winamp does something similar and they call that "normalization". So you play your play list and don't get pissed off all the time because a music is suddenly so silent that you must stand up and pull up the volume, and the next song is so loud that your windows explode and your ears get crippled. You know what I mean... so I need to adjust volume for every little sound file separately ;-)

How?

Answer 1

You need to look for the gain property in finch and AL_GAIN in OpenAL.

I don't know of any built in support for normalization in OpenAL. I think normalization is a pretty intensive process (for a mobile at least), as you have to scan the entire sound data in the process. Much better to normalize your tracks outside the app.