Re: How can I compress audio?

David K wrote:
> Thanks for all your help, but my new desktop computer is a Dell Inspiron 3880. 
> Are there any free (completely free rather than a free trial or anything else)
> software programs or plug-ins that I can download and install to use with my
> Windows Media Player 12.0 that I have on Windows 10?  Thanks again for any 
> further help!  I've also found "Quiet Mode" & "Loudness Equalization" being
> discussed on the Internet in reference to dynamic range compression with
> Windows Media Player and/or Windows 10, but I can't seem to be able to find
> them easily anywhere on my PC!

Audacity is free software.

You can even find the old versions.

http://www.oldversion.com/windows/audacity/

The version on my PC is 2.0.3, which is
from the year 2013. It's just a coincidence that
this is the last one uploaded to Oldversion.com .

On old versions of Audacity, some patent for MP3 was
still sitting around, so the LAME output plugin had
to be downloaded and added separately. On newer versions
of Audacity, that's no longer necessary. The Frauenhoffer
patent may have expired (something like that). And
MP3 might not be needed anyway, if you're just doing
output to .wav files.

*******

My typing PC (this one), doesn't have a Loudness.

The other PC has RealTek audio, has the actual Realtek Audio
driver installed, and it has the Loudness Equalization tick box.

    https://i.postimg.cc/9z5GH1BN/realtek-audio-driver.gif    [Picture]

The difference is "driver Digital Signal Processing", which
can include things like the graphic equalizer function (to
adjust the gain in the various audio bands), and also includes
echo/reverberation ("Concert Hall") to the sound channel. There
are also include HRTF (Head Transfer Function?) transformations,
to change the number of audio channels. For example, properly
converting a 5.1 input audio signal from a movie, into a stereo
projection that does not lose stuff.

The plain Windows 10 audio driver may have some of these functions,
but the defaults should be for the functions to be "off". If you
install the custom driver, hunt it down, then you get a
control panel with some tick boxes, for control of the items.

You'd have to start in Device Manager (right-click Start and find it
in the list), do Properties on the audio device, get the Hardware ID,
and figure out what the audio is from there. The Windows 10 generic
stuff that automatically installs, I don't think it does a
particularly good job of telling you what your audio hardware is.
As an example, this is my non-RealTek hardware, with its idea of
toys and tick boxes, and this is without a separate driver hunt,
because a separate driver should not exist for this one. This
hardware was always driver-poor, and I don't think the company
even makes 48 pin PC sound chips any more. So where the functions
listed on the right came from, that's a complete mystery from
a corporate standpoint.

    https://i.postimg.cc/fWcd79qV/soundmax-generic-decorations.gif  [Picture]

That's a Soundmax HDAudio chip in a shielded box in a tiny plugin
card that goes in a combo PCIe/HDaudio wired slot. A kind of kooky
audio card :-) But at least it makes the computer sounds
like "you have mail" and so on. I've long since given up on
topics like "frequency response" or whatever :-)

Some of the audio drivers, you can't actually disable the special effects
completely - this is why I do test cases, to catch the drivers
"doing stuff". You can take the LineOut from one PC, into the
LineIn of a second PC, and record the output, put in a "known"
synthetic waveform (trapezoidal pulse drawn in Audacity), then
observe by recording the waveform, how the stupid computer
made mush out of it. (In my case, I discovered reverb that
should not be there.)

By doing tests like that, you can also discover other neat
things, such as "there is no difference between 96000 sampling
and 192000 sampling on my PC - both have the same corner
frequency". Which negates the whole purpose of the HDAudio companies
advertising how they doubled the sampling rate maximum frequency.
For nothing. The anti-aliasing filter is not properly set. So I
can't use a high quality piezo mike and listen to bats chirping :-)

    Paul