Music/Video audio normalization option
#1
it would be great that all the songs in a playlist were at (more or less) the same volume level.
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#2
afaik, this is not possible for xbmc to do. then it would have to adjust dynamically and you can imagine how that would sound. (.:o .)

however, all is not lost, there's a program called mp3gain that will scan mp3's on your pc and set them all to the same level, 89 is the recommended value, which can actually improve alot of tunes, because of the bad way modern music is mastered these days.
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#3
i think you should add a feature that takes normalize audio further, right now normalize audio only works with the file being played, so its good for watching a movie file at night where the loud action scenes are normalized to the non action scenes, but what we need is for it to normalize audio from file to file, so when i creat a play list of music videos, i dont run into where it switches to a hella loud video, or even a hell quiet one, it should normalize them all to the same level, or maybe what they need to do is make media centre remember the files settings for each file played so when u play a file for the first time it creats a file with the settings for that file, so next time u tell it to play that file it checks yer last settings for that file and uses them, of course u could turn off this option, but it would solve the probs of video files and mp3's that have extreme volume differences from file to file. Image
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#4
replaygain is what you are referring to for mp3's. basically, it stores the average (rms) loudness of the file inside a tag. i'm not sure if mplayer handles replaygain tags correctly or not - it has to be handled by the decoder to be effective iirc.

normalization after decoding is possible, but not nice, due to the artifacts that can (and do) result. this requires scanning the entire file and noting the average volume and storing the result. imo this is probably not worth it, although with the video database now in place, it's easy enough to store this sort of thing ("preferred volume" for instance)

personally, i think the biggest advance needed at the moment is for the database file(s) to be easily editable on the pc. as i understand it, it's just a sql database, so should be easily enough to do.
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#5
whats with the xbmp options:

amplify audio
normalize audio

??

it would be great if they come to xbmc too! (i need them!!Wink
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#6
in xbmc we are currently using the maximum available volume for audio. any higher and you'll get clipping.

ofcourse, you are welcome to increase it more. see "volume amplification" in the settings->music menu.

note that this only applies to files played with mplayer currently (mp3, wma, ogg, flac) not the other engines (ie doesn't work with cd playback, or mod/sid playback).
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#7
(jmarshall @ mar. 17 2004,20:18 Wrote:in xbmc we are currently using the maximum available volume for audio. any higher and you'll get clipping.

ofcourse, you are welcome to increase it more. see "volume amplification" in the settings->music menu.

note that this only applies to files played with mplayer currently (mp3, wma, ogg, flac) not the other engines (ie doesn't work with cd playback, or mod/sid playback).
the volume amplification setting only works with videos now. personally i think it should work for both music and videos like it used to, then i could fix the clipping that i'm getting on some audio files.
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#8
yes, you are correct. i'm not sure why this is like it is. i've just changed it and checked it in to cvs.

perhaps 2 separate options are needed here. one for audio and one for video?
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#9
i have noticed quite a few videos aren't playing at their loudest on my system like was implied above... only after kicking the volume amplification up to about 15-30 or so do some videos sound normal.

then of course i switch back to my music which normally sounds ok.. and of course it has gone to hell. Sad
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#10
what would clip if the volume is raised? audio in video or plain audio?
would it be possible, assuming it's not video, to have a default volume option for the osd? so for example for me it would be half way by default (which would be the normal volume as i would set volume amplification) and full would be 200% (for those softer movies). i wouldn't however like it to start at 200% all the time as most of my movies are loud enough at 100% and could possibly blow my ear drums or speakers at 200.

thanks
morien
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#11
(jmarshall @ mar. 17 2004,22:15 Wrote:perhaps 2 separate options are needed here.  one for audio and one for video?
yes, i think that would be a good idea
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#12
i noticed dvd files have lower sound than divx so it would be nice to be able to have an option to only amplify with ac3/dts sound
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#13
me too i'd like very much if the audio in the playlist could be outputted normalized.

thanx!
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#14
normalized audio output is not easy to do.

i'm not sure if mplayer supports replaygain reading, but if it does, then that is one way to achieve it.

otherwise, we have to scan the file first to find the average audio level in order to amplify it afterwards the correct amount. this takes lots of time.

another possibility is that we could read the replaygain info in (for music, anyway) when we do a database scan, and store it for later. that way we get reliable normalization of each track.

as for volume amplification on a per-video basis, we can add this to the osd (already has a volume slider there) and save it in the database for next time.

doing it based on file format is not a good idea. it should be per file, not per file format.
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#15
(jmarshall @ mar. 18 2004,22:10 Wrote:i'm not sure if mplayer supports replaygain reading, but if it does, then that is one way to achieve it.
mplayer (and xbmc without even realising it) supports replaygain, but only for ogg vorbis files. try playing a replaygained ogg file in xbmc and you'll find that it is noticably quieter to the same file without replaygain applied.
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Music/Video audio normalization option0