I play all my multichannel music these days from FLAC files and the different volume levels between tracks/albums used to have me constantly changing my volume up and down to compensate.
I started using ReplayGain which normalises the sound levels without actually altering the audio stream stored in any files. The required loudness level (+/- db) is just tagged as metadata. Most playback software and devices will change the volume level as tagged (RepalyGain) during playback. This has worked great for my Kodi playback, especially as I often play many songs from many different albums mastered at different levels.
Just wondering what others do?
I'm just about finished adding a new tool in Music Media Helper that implements ITU-R BS.1770 using the BS1770GAIN program, primarily as I had applied ReplayGain to some of my files as part of my original conversion from discs and I wanted a way to see which albums/files I'd done and which ones needed to be done. Once I had that list I figured it would be nice to scan the files not done and apply the ReplayGain tags at the same time.
Info on the BS1770GAIN ReplayGain tool:
Audio from different sources can be expected to be different loud and it would be nice to automatically adapt all these audio sources to the same loudness. Fortunately the ITU-R in their BS.1770 standard defines an algorithm which makes it possible to measure the loudness of a certain audio source, including multichannel
BS1770GAIN implements the ITU-R BS.1770 loudness measurement algorithm and makes it accessible to a user in several ways as known from the EBU R128 standard, i.e.
The integrated loudness is the two phase gated measurement of the mean loudness as described by ITU-R BS.1770. All measures are described in detail by EBU R128.
On top of that BS1770GAIN provides to additional measures not related to loudness:
This is an interesting document on ITU-R BS.1770 which also discusses how multichannel loudness is measured:
https://reva.blob.core.windows.net/mmh/BS.1770-4-201510-I.pdf
I started using ReplayGain which normalises the sound levels without actually altering the audio stream stored in any files. The required loudness level (+/- db) is just tagged as metadata. Most playback software and devices will change the volume level as tagged (RepalyGain) during playback. This has worked great for my Kodi playback, especially as I often play many songs from many different albums mastered at different levels.
Just wondering what others do?
I'm just about finished adding a new tool in Music Media Helper that implements ITU-R BS.1770 using the BS1770GAIN program, primarily as I had applied ReplayGain to some of my files as part of my original conversion from discs and I wanted a way to see which albums/files I'd done and which ones needed to be done. Once I had that list I figured it would be nice to scan the files not done and apply the ReplayGain tags at the same time.
Info on the BS1770GAIN ReplayGain tool:
Audio from different sources can be expected to be different loud and it would be nice to automatically adapt all these audio sources to the same loudness. Fortunately the ITU-R in their BS.1770 standard defines an algorithm which makes it possible to measure the loudness of a certain audio source, including multichannel
BS1770GAIN implements the ITU-R BS.1770 loudness measurement algorithm and makes it accessible to a user in several ways as known from the EBU R128 standard, i.e.
- measurement of the integrated loudness,
- measurement of the maximum short term loudness,
- measurement of the maximum momentary loudness, and
- measurement of the loudness range.
The integrated loudness is the two phase gated measurement of the mean loudness as described by ITU-R BS.1770. All measures are described in detail by EBU R128.
On top of that BS1770GAIN provides to additional measures not related to loudness:
- measurement of the maximum sample peak (ordinary peak), and
- measurement of the maximum true peak (peak due to upsampling)
This is an interesting document on ITU-R BS.1770 which also discusses how multichannel loudness is measured:
https://reva.blob.core.windows.net/mmh/BS.1770-4-201510-I.pdf