In order to make my show fit on a dvd I encoded the audio at 256.  I compared the original wave file to the new ac3 file and the original wave file was almost 2x as loud.  Is this typical?

K

What did you use to encode the ac3?  Did it have a normalise or peak limit option?

Was the original wave monotracks? or a stereo file?

 I used "ffmpeggui" 

I don't think there are any normnalise or peak limit options with this program.  The settings were "bitrate" - 256; format - AC3; Sampling - 48000; and channels - 2.

The original audio from my timeline had 3 tracks - each track was panned center (so that when you played the single track the 2 audio meters bounced).  Each track was bumped up to about +5 so that the yellow bars showed.  I exported these 3 tracks as stereo, wave, 48kHz.  I then encoded with ffmpeggui.  Then I compared the exported (wave) file to the converted AC3 file using Goldwave.  I placed the waveform plots one on top of the other.  The original wave file was almost 2x as loud. 

I found a way around the problem by bumping the original audio even higher but I don't think this is the right way to do it.

K