Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Maxxwire]

I had been using volume leveling with very accurate results in MC20, but now that I have upgraded to MC21 it seems to me to be broken. In MC20 volume leveling would compensate each track individually to -1 dBTP Peak (Level 128). With MC21 all of the tracks in a playlist are now being compensated by the exact same amount. For example in the playlist below the new MC21 volume leveling feature compensated each and every track by the same amount of -2.7 dB where before in MC20 each track was being individually compensated. I also do not understand what reference is being used to generate the -2.7 dB compensation for each track in this example playlist...



I tried to re-analyze the tracts in hopes that there might be some new method of calculation created in MC21, but there were no changes. I am hoping that I will be able to find out how this new volume leveling works or what I am probably doing wrong to enable this feature because the volume leveling that was working so well for me in MC20 has been changed and now works the same as in MC21.

[blgentry]

The files in the playlist shown look like they might all be from the same album.  MC does volume leveling differently for songs in the same album.  It uses an album average (sorta) for tracks from the same album.  That way intra-album volume level differences are preserved.  Which is what you want when listening to albums.

Brian.

[Maxxwire]

It uses an album average (sorta) for tracks from the same album.  That way intra-album volume level differences are preserved.  Which is what you want when listening to albums.

Brian.

Brian- Thank you so much for your reply. What I got used to in MC20 was volume leveling for each individual track in the album so that all tracks would play back at the exact same volume. This is what I came to understand as the very definition of 'volume leveling'. Now in MC21 I am wondering what benefit it is to have the volume of every track on an album played back at a uniform -2.7 dB as in my example when traditional volume leveling each individual track to -1 dBTP would equally provide volume leveling between albums. I am having a difficult time understanding how having the differences in the volume levels of each the tracks on an album being preserved can be considered true volume leveling and an improvement over the traditional method of leveling the volume of each track and therefore leveling the volume of all albums that are played back.  

[blgentry]

If you mix tracks from different albums, they will be volume leveled appropriately.  I do this all the time and it works quite well.

Tracks from the same album are leveled to a common target so that you can listen to a whole album and hear the differences in volume level from track to track as the artists intended the album to be heard.  I think JRiver did this so you wouldn't have to turn volume leveling off every time you wanted to listen to an album as a whole.

When I learned about this feature, I thought that the "album leveling" only applied to sequential tracks from the same album.  However, it appears that this album leveling is done to any tracks from the same album that are in the same playlist, next to each other.  I'm really not 100% sure.  Maybe someone else can comment further.

I just know that volume leveling works well with a mixed playlist.  You might also want to turn on Adaptive Volume (peak level normalize). That will bring back some of the lost gain from volume leveling.

Brian.