Sorry to bump an old post but, I figure this is better than starting another, I dont think the audio output is as loud as It should be, Im also a bit hard of hearing(maybe from listening to headphones to loud, but whatever) So, I started looking into some little amps to "pump up the volume" a bit, there is sumthin called a boostaroo which runs about 20-25us on fleabay, and has 3 jacks, there are also some handbuilt units on there as well, they claim to have better sound quality and run about 20-50$us.
I enjoy fiddling around a bit with electronics and have put together some small kits used to attach to a pc to emulate smartcards and I fix some stuff around the house when it breaks so I figured if these bozos are making and selling these things, why couldn't I so I poked around a bit and found this link http://tangentsoft.net/audio/cmoy-tutorial/ this design seems to be easy to build and while not the best type of mini amp, Id say its better or as good as the boostaroo...All of the parts from digikey add up to about 28$ without an enclosure so I think I'm gonna go the DIY route...
Ill try to update as I progress thru this little project,
WRT the original poster's question (if anyone cares), a software way does exist, if you're using MP3s. You can use mp3gain to losslessly amplify/normalize MP3s by twiddling values in the mp3. Because it doesn't decompress/recompress, just twiddles stuff in place, no additional loss is incurred (beyond the original loss when encoding).
Are you sure you're playing the audio as loud as it can get? Remember that there are TWO volume controls, 1 is the global system volume (adjusted through the speaker icon on your desktop) and also the application specific volume (i.e. media player volume control).
yea, I keep the system all the way up then use the app slider to control the level, tho it seems that sometimes they seem to back off just a bit from all the way up from time to time, but I havent pinned it down enuff to submit a bug, maybe I will or maybe its just a figment of my imagination...
