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Krater
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it would be great that all the songs in a playlist were at (more or less) the same volume level.
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pike
Team Kodi Admin
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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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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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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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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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Morien
Senior Member
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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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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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febs
Senior Member
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me too i'd like very much if the audio in the playlist could be outputted normalized.
thanx!
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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.