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[lendall]

This picks up from another thread I initiated on this topic, the reason being that I was getting large amounts of clipping and distortion if I selected the "apply DSP effects" option during format conversion and chose both Volume Leveling and Adaptive Volume/Night Mode as my DSP settings.  For this experiment I selected a group of sample tracks to convert representing a wide range of volume levels.  One way I did this was to use the Wizard to look for tracks with greater than +5 Volume Level (Replay Gain) and less than -5 Volume Level (Replay Gain).  I did the conversions in two ways:  First using Volume Leveling/Adaptive Volume/Peak Level Normalize as my setting; and then using Volume Leveling only, with Adaptive Volume unchecked.  The results are attached as screenshots from Audacity.

With a low level track neither Volume Leveling alone nor Volume Leveling/Peak Level Normalize make any difference whatsoever (or none that I can discern) in the level of the converted track.

With a medium level track Volume Leveling with Adaptive Volume/Peak Level Normalize raises the overall level of the track somewhat but does not result in any clipping.  Volume Leveling alone, however, results in a rather drastic overall lowering of the level of the track. (BTW, converting this same track using Volume Leveling/Adaptive Volume/Night mode resulted in massive clipping).

On a track which has in my opinion a wide volume range, Volume Leveling with Adaptive Volume/Peak Level Normalize raises the overall level quite a bit and results in a little bit of clipping.  Volume Leveling alone reduces the volume of the extremely loud passages and results overall in a pleasant sounding track.  I am slightly confused here because I was under the impression that it was Adaptive Volume/Night mode that resulted in volume compression within tracks, while Volume Leveling alone merely "adjusts the playback volume to the same level for all files."

Someone suggested that using the DSP functions during file conversion made very little sense, and I am beginning to agree with them.  Presumably these same volume-related DSP effects work better when used during playback, but I do not have equipment here which would enable me to test that.