6) beats per minute
Do you people create playlists based on BPM? How accurate would you say the measurement is? It is the first time my music got analyzed for BPM and I haven't payed much attention to the results yet, but there is one track that really caught my attention - "Funky Shit" by The Prodigy. It's listed as 62 BPM, but this value seems like it's way below what it actually is.
I've often seen tracks where the BPM value is half of what it should be.
Aphex Twin's Syro album actually has the BPM values in the song name, and MC can be off what they should be.
7) loudness
I used an ios app for calibration and as a result set my reference level to 85 (not that it's very relevant 
). So the loudness feature kicks in only when the volume slider goes below the reference level. May I ask why it is this way? What I am mean to ask is why doesn't loudness account for the volume leveling?
You have told MC that when volume is set to 85, your speakers (headphones?) are outputting 83dB SPL when you play the -20dB test signals.
At reference level, audio sounds as intended.
As you lower the volume EQ is applied which should, in theory, mean that it sound the same at say 60dB rather than 83dB.
To use this feature you must only use MC's internal volume control, and cannot touch the volume level on your amp once you have set it to this level.
I'd be skeptical that an iOS volume level app would be accurate enough for this.
An app would probably be fine if all you were doing was level matching speakers, but you actually need an absolute level of 83dB for this to work correctly, which generally requires a calibrated SPL meter.
Volume Leveling should not affect this because it brings all the albums to a fixed reference level. If anything, it should improve the results.
You would have to calibrate the reference level with Volume Leveling enabled though. (or offset it by 3dB)
9) volume leveling vs adaptive volume
Could someone please explain to me the difference between volume leveling and adaptive volume(peak level normalize)? Right now I have adaptive volume(peak level normalize) enabled and songs seem to play back at the same volume. How does volume leveling differ from that?
Peak Leveling is the old form of volume leveling that was used decades ago and is essentially the cause of the "
loudness war".
Peak leveling is a simplistic tool which simply looks for the loudest sample in a track, calculates its difference from 0dB, and increases the volume by that amount. (note: MC should use -1 dBTP rather than 0 dBFS)
This plays back the track as loud as possible without clipping.
What happens is that as the dynamic range of a track varies, the playback level will also vary.
If you have a highly compressed song where the peaks are only 3dB louder than the average, it will play very loud.
If you have a highly dynamic song where the peaks are 30dB louder than the average level, it will play very quiet - especially if it is played right after that previous track.
Volume Leveling does a smart analysis to figure out the average perceived loudness of a file, regardless of dynamic range, and adjusts the average loudness of all tracks (or albums) to a fixed target of -23 LUFS.
This should result in a significantly more even level across various tracks or albums - to the point that many people feel that they can set a comfortable level for that listening session and never have to touch the volume control again.
Now if you aren't playing back material with varied dynamic range (e.g. a CD from the 80's compared to a CD released this year) then it's possible that all of the tracks have a similar dynamic range and peak normalization does an okay job making volume
appear to be even. But Volume Leveling will do this regardless of what you're playing.
10) add song as next to play
If I pressed "add(as next to play)" a particular song would indeed be played next, however that song would also remain at its original position in the playing now list, so it would end up playing twice. To prevent this from happening I can manually drag a song I want to be played next up the list. The inconvenience is that if that song is located several hundred positions down the list dragging it all the way up becomes very tiresome.
Is there a way to add a song as next to play in two clicks without duplicating it?
A set of "move to..." commands when you're in a playlist or Playing Now view could be useful. Nothing like that currently exists.
Author
Topic: New user here. Got some questions (Read 18818 times)