The audio signal amplitude is not the same across different CDs or even different tracks on the same CD.
You may have noticed that some CDs sound "louder" than others even when played at the same volume level.
Normalization finds the highest audio peak in the sound data and scales the data to yield a uniform loudness.
Use this option to amplify the audio data (when the scale is greater than 100%) or attenuate it (when the scale is less than 100%).
For example, a scale of 200% makes the sound roughly twice as loud, while a scale of 50% makes it sound about half as loud.
Keep in mind that because CD audio data has a limited range (16 bits), large scale values can can cause audio data at the extremes to clip, which can result in the sound becoming distorted.
CD ripping consists conceptually of two stages—reading the CD, then encoding the audio data (into, say, MP3 format).
When this option is enabled, Riptastic! will use spare background CPU time to encode simultaneously while reading the CD.
This can result in significant time savings, especially if you have a really fast CPU.
Note, some options such as Normalization and Silence Trimming are inherently incompatible with one-pass extraction, and will disable one-pass extraction automatically.
For more information about CD ripping, please see Capturing.
The General Options may be shown or hidden via the View Menu.
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