Some albums distorting, please help :o(

The issue is a combination of what passes for mastering/production today and the iPod's ability to handle over-compressed songs (iPods seem to be more prone to clipping than other devices). I have over 13,000 tracks on my iPod and have run about 75% of them through MP3Gain (I leave classical and jazz recordings alone as they are usually mastered correctly). Lowering the average gain (from, say, 100dB to 93dB) of the tracks makes a huge difference in listenability (you may even notice an improvement when listening on more forgiving devices). MP3Gain does not fix everything (for instance, Metallica's Death Magnetic is simply a mess), but it fixes a very large percentage of these over-compressed songs. Your older albums sound fine because ten years ago (and earlier) producers knew what they were doing and did not have the philosophy "louder is better."

It may seem like overkill, but some albums are mastered so badly, they actually sound better/cleaner on my iPod (post-MP3Gain) than on the original CD. If you download MP3Gain, and simply analyze a few newer albums, you will see how many of them are likely to distort (tracks marked in red).

As I said, many of my post-MP3Gain tracks sound better than the original CDs. My experience with my own iPods (I've used the 5G Video and the 6G Classic extensively) is these over-compressed albums are distorted on both.

MP3Gain is not difficult to use. You can change the gain in two different ways:

• you can set all of your songs to the same average gain (they will all have the same approximate volume when played back) OR
  
• you can set it so that each album's average gain will be the same (this will maintain each album's dynamic range).
  I've chosen to use the second method since if an artist has chosen to have softer and louder songs on an album, this is the way I'd like them played. Using this method, I do not have one album that is significantly louder (or softer) than any other.
  You can also choose the gain that the program applies. The default is 89dB, but I found that to be too low. I've set mine to 93dB for most albums (some albums are set to 91 or 92 because they were still clipping).
  Try it on a couple of albums. All changes are reversible and there is no degradation to the music because the music is not re-encoded. There is simply a tag added to the music files to indicate the gain at which the track should be played. If you do not like the results, the tag can be removed by the program.
  Ultimately, this is the fault of record producers. You have discovered that older albums sound fine, it is just the newer ones that have this problem.

Try installing the FULL version (it's the third choice on This Page). This will install the Visual Basic Runtime Libraries as well (which includes the OCX file in question).

Let me know if you have any other questions.