I’m encountering an issue where all of the tracks in an album are super quiet compared to the rest of my songs. I know this is caused by volume leveling, as the issue goes away after turning it off. Additionally, this only happens with PlexAmp. My understanding is that’s because PlexAmp is the only (official) client that looks at the volume data.
When I do “get info” for one of the songs in the album, I can see the album gain is -51.00. This is presumably caused by the album peak of 11423.958008, which seems ridiculously high.
Does this mean I have bad files? Is there a way to override the values for this album?
I would prefer to keep volume leveling on in PlexAmp, as in general it works really well. For context, I got the files directly from the iTunes Store, so they aren’t some random ones.
Even if you don’t have a specific solution for this, I would be curious to know more about where the album peak comes from. Is it pulled from a service? Or is it something Plex generates locally by analyzing the file?
I seem to remember a similar case with files which were obtained from Apple, but were later “un-DRM’ed”. One of the tracks had a nasty peak (during an erroneous noise) in it, which spoiled the “album peak” value.
So if you deliver sample files, it has to be the whole album.
Thanks for the replies! With your comments I decided to take a look at the files and found one of them was corrupted or something, so perhaps that was creating an issue. Wouldn’t load in Audacity or Studio One 4. The waveform for the rest of the songs looked normal - no massive spikes anywhere.
I’ve deleted the album from Plex and iTunes, then re-downloaded it from iTunes. The one song is no longer corrupted. Now waiting for the volume level analysis to be done again. If this didn’t fix the issue I’ll upload the album for you to take a look at (DM’d link so I’m not sharing purchased music with the internet).
I’ll also update the thread if everything seems fixed.
Ok, turns out that corrupted file was indeed messing with the volume analysis. It re-ran last night with the newly downloaded album, without corrupted file, and it works great now.
Here’s the corrupted file. Providing it in case you want to dig into why Plex still scanned it and produced an erroneous value rather than ignoring it, which seems like it would be the ideal behavior.
