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Author Topic: Volume levelling for files that haven't been analysed  (Read 1746 times)

J-a-k-e

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Volume levelling for files that haven't been analysed
« on: December 08, 2011, 08:42:04 pm »

I uses volume levelling as many people do here, so that I may play my music collection with the knowledge that different tracks are going to play at around the same volume level. I don't have to worry about wither one track is overly louder or quieter than another. The downside of this is that When I add audio files to my library I always have to run the analyse audio tool before playing them which is something I've become quite accustomed to. There is however the painful task of ensuring that anyone else who wants to add and play a song in media centre knows to either analyse the track first or turn the volume right down before playing.

Getting to the point now.. Is it possible to set a default user specified volume levelling DB reduction that comes into play if the current playing track has not been analysed yet? As things stand it can make for an interesting experience having to scramble for the volume control if someone adds an unanalysed track that would otherwise sit at say -15db. Think 50% as a fairly comfortable listening volume bearing on the edge of loud for the lounge area, 15db louder generally sits at just below full noise for the stereo system. you would be right in guessing reaction is usually something along the lines of oh ****.
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BryanC

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Re: Volume levelling for files that haven't been analysed
« Reply #1 on: December 08, 2011, 08:56:29 pm »

Problem 1: Options->Library and Folders->Configure auto-import->Select automatically analyze files

Problem 2: Not a great solution, but Options->Audio->DSP and Output format, select fixed and then add some gain back, like 10db. The clipping protection should kick in for anything that will exceed that, but I'm not positive about how finely-tuned that mechanism is.
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Matt

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Re: Volume levelling for files that haven't been analysed
« Reply #2 on: December 08, 2011, 08:58:01 pm »

I think Media Center may already be a step ahead of you.

When you mix analyzed and not-analyzed files, the not-analyzed files use the average (or maybe median, I don't remember) replay gain of the analyzed files.  It works pretty well in real world use.
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Matt Ashland, JRiver Media Center

J-a-k-e

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Re: Volume levelling for files that haven't been analysed
« Reply #3 on: December 08, 2011, 09:39:53 pm »

I think Media Center may already be a step ahead of you.

When you mix analyzed and not-analyzed files, the not-analyzed files use the average (or maybe median, I don't remember) replay gain of the analyzed files.  It works pretty well in real world use.

For the most part the current implementation works very well with a mix of analysed and non-analysed files but is there a way to set a default 'reference' volume for when the now playing zone doesn't contain any analysed files to use as a reference?
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BryanC

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Re: Volume levelling for files that haven't been analysed
« Reply #4 on: December 09, 2011, 12:37:24 am »

I think Media Center may already be a step ahead of you.

When you mix analyzed and not-analyzed files, the not-analyzed files use the average (or maybe median, I don't remember) replay gain of the analyzed files.  It works pretty well in real world use.

Wow, I did not know that. I'm guessing those values aren't parsed during handheld conversion...?
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Alex B

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Re: Volume levelling for files that haven't been analysed
« Reply #5 on: December 09, 2011, 02:26:01 pm »

I think Media Center may already be a step ahead of you.

When you mix analyzed and not-analyzed files, the not-analyzed files use the average (or maybe median, I don't remember) replay gain of the analyzed files.  It works pretty well in real world use.

For the most part the current implementation works very well with a mix of analysed and non-analysed files but is there a way to set a default 'reference' volume for when the now playing zone doesn't contain any analysed files to use as a reference?

You are both quite right, automatic is good, but it can go quite wrong when non-analyzed tracks replace analyzed tracks in the PN list.

A usable fix would be to use the whole library as a reference.

I calculated the average and median Replay Gain values of my complete audio library and a few subsets:

Genre     All      Classical  Rock & Pop  Metal
Average   -10.56   -4.36      -10.82      -13.46
Median    -10.82   -5.15      -11.13      -13.91


I think it would work fine. For example, if the user has mostly Classical the default attenuation would be smaller than if the user has mostly Metal.

I wonder if this would be technically possible and if it could cause speed problems? Excel had no speed problems with my about 80,000 test files. It calculated the "All" value in an instance. The only problem was the limit of 64,000 rows. I had to split the All column to two separate columns and create formulas for the combined result values.
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