Play all songs at same volume?

[MDMcKelvie]

Is there a setting to ensure the volume is the same for all songs in a Playlist?

Thanks!

[andrewilley]

There is in indeed, it's a feature called Reply Gain, which can be enabled in Settings > Audio > Replay Gain. There are two settings, per-Track and per-Album. Per-track treats each track as an isolated entity and sets the gain so its peak level will match against any other tracks, and this is what you would use for Playlists or single-song listening. Per-album sets the same gain level for every track in the same album, so the perceived level doesn't seem to appear between each track in one album.

Your audio files must have been correctly encoded with RG tags in  advance though, it's not a 'scan-on-the-fly' system. Your files may already be tagged, but if not it's a pretty simple one-off task to do it. I use a program called foobar2000 on my PC which can handle my whole music collection in one go and apply the necessary information to each file.

Note: this will not necessary maximise the volume levels, it's not designed to. The default Replay Gain spec is to aim for a equal peak target level of about 14dB below digital maximum (to allow headroom for equalization and effects). You can adjust this in the menu though if you don't use a lot of audio tweaking.

For more info, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayGain

Andre

[MDMcKelvie]

Excellent.  Thank you! 

[flearhcp97]

In order to analyze everything with Foobar, I have to move it all to my PC?

Or is there an Android app?

Also, does it do flac and mp3?

Thanks!

[andrewilley]

@flearhcp97  Foobar2000 handles pretty much any format.

Yes, there is an Android app version but I don't know if it does the more complex stuff like ReplayGain analysis - it's so much easier and faster to do on a computer that I haven't really looked into it.

To be honest though, a breakable, stealable, losable, dropable piece of tech like a phone shouldn't really be considered as your 'master' storage location for anything at all. My entire music collection resides on my PC - well, technically on our household NAS drive which has single-drive failure redundancy and a separate password-protected backup. I just copy whatever I want to carry around with me onto my phone (which is currently about 65GB out of approx. 300GB).

Andre

[Fitzian]

Foobar2000 on Android can do replaygain analysis and save these to metadata tags (but the brute force of a home computer will make easier work of this, as stated above).

Edited January 5, 2022 by Fitzian

[MotleyG]

8 hours ago, andrewilley said:

To be honest though, a breakable, stealable, losable, dropable piece of tech like a phone shouldn't really be considered as your 'master' storage location for anything at all. My entire music collection resides on my PC - well, technically on our household NAS drive which has single-drive failure redundancy and a separate password-protected backup. I just copy whatever I want to carry around with me onto my phone (which is currently about 65GB out of approx. 300GB).

I couldn’t agree more. With music libraries growing, and the amount of effort to manage the tagging details, a back up, or even even two should be maintained regularly.

[Peter Cuevas]

It's more easy to do it on MediaMonkey

[andrewilley]

There are many ways to do it of course, Foobar seems to be the most common and long-standing, but whatever works for you.

In Foobar, I simply drag my entire music folder onto the foobar icon and once the content has been fetched I Select All and use ReplayGain > Scan in the right-click menu. Then once the scan of everything is complete I click Update to insert all the results back into the files. Can't get much simpler to be honest. For large collections each step can take a while though, even on a fast computer, so I just leave it running in the background. Once done though, you never have to do it again other then when adding new music if it is not already properly tagged.

Andre