How to remove Music Loudness?

Plex Players Gaming Consoles
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1

I’m having a weird issue when playing music, the volume in tracks goes really quite then really loud (in the same audio track).

If I play the audio file outside of Plex it sounds fine. I’ve now disabled “Analyze audio tracks for loudness” but all my audio tracks still show the Loudness setting they have when I Get Info on them.

I’ve tried Analyzing and refreshing Metadata but it doesn’t remove the Loudless. How can I remove the Loudless from the tracks? I want to do this to see if in fact this is the cause of my issue volume.

2

Removing the loudness analysis is quite involving. Considering how much computing power it took to compute it, you should first try to solve the issue.
Please describe your issue more in detail.
Which Plex client type are you using?
How does the issue manifest itself?

3

Thanks for the follow-up, I was hoping it would be simple but since its not maybe resolving it is better.

I just did some further testing and it’s only happening on my PS4.
It works fine on my iPhone Xs, Fire TV Stick, Roku and via Web.

The only difference I notice is that the PS4 has to transcode the stream. Any thoughts on that?

4

What happens on the PS4?

5

I start a song and the audio constantly goes louder and quieter as the track plays. Happens with all tracks.

Like one second it will sound fine then a second later it will be very quiet then after a few more seconds it will sound fine again.

6

And this happens only when playing music?
Not, when playing a movie in Plex or during gaming?

7

Doesn’t happen in Movies or TV shows on Plex. The only other thing I use it for is YouTube and that’s fine as well.

Movies and TV don’t require transcoding.

8

Does it happen in all tracks or only in some?
The developer would like to have a track which reproduces the issue.
Could you supply one track? (send a download link to me per PM, please)

9

Here is an idea:
Do you have a feature in your TV which prevents “audio clipping” or a feature which is named like “night mode”, or “peak limiter”, or “loudness reduction”?
If so, switch that off for a while and try to reproduce the issue.

10

I PM’ed you a song. It seem to happen with all them but this one is most noticeable when you hit the 40 second mark.

No audio features enabled on my TV and the same TV sounds fine with the Amazon Fire TV Stick.

11

Yeah, the sample confirms my last suspicion.
It has been mastered so poorly (i.e. too loud) that you get tons of clipping, particularly after this 0:40 time stamp. So there is a “limiter”-type of feature which kicks in there. Where this limiter is to be located is difficult to say.
It is not in the Plex app though.
It could be in the PS4 or in your TV. Or in the sound bar. Or in the speakers. Or…

12

Okay thanks for the help. Hopefully getting rid of the PS4 soon and maybe I need to consider re-ripping all my old music to get better quality from them.

13

As I said, the limiter could be somewhere else in the signal chain. It is not certain that the PS4 is to blame here.

14

Well the TV works with another non-PS4 device. So the issue is either on the PS4 side or the Plex Server transcoder converting from MP3 to AAC.

15

Understood.

16

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