Been using plexamp non-stop since v1 came out and am now loving v3. I recently added Tidal to my account (still on the trial and really enjoying it) but I’ve noticed that the volume levelling doesn’t seem to always work on Tidal tracks. Not sure if it’s a server error or a plexamp error but occasionally I’ll have my ear drums blown out by a song in Discover Radio or an artist radio that’s way louder than the rest of my songs.
According to Last.fm here’s what Discover Radio was playing for me, and then this Les Big Byrd song came on at like double the volume of the Syd Arthur song
Maybe it’s just an issue with that song? I know in the past I had a Thrice album that was way louder than everything else locally and I finally ended up having to re-rip the CD so whatever had been done to that MP3 in the past 10 years was cleared out and then it matched properly. I think that was related to Plex picking up some incorrect mp3gain leveling from forever ago but maybe it’s related to this?
Did some more listening and I think I might have stumbled upon a potential cause…
The volume issue seems to happen 90% of the time if I hit next track to go to a tidal song from a non-tidal song.
Around a minute before a song is completed it goes and tries to get the next song so that is can do up to 45 seconds of sweet fade if needed. Seems like if this whole process happens then the chances are pretty good it gets to properly analyze the song and fix the volume.
If I hit next track way before the current song is done then plexamp skips all of that and immediately jumps to the next track and tries to start playing it. Seems like it doesn’t wait for the server to check the volume in this case. My guess is because Plex is trying to stream the file to plexamp as it’s downloading from Tidal to decrease how long you have to wait to start hearing sound. But without the whole file downloaded it probably can’t run the volume analyzer, so Plexamp just goes ahead and plays the file default.
If my suspicion is correct then you might have to add an extra “wait for server to fully have the file” thing to song playback. Not sure how good that works if someone is doing tidal hifi and their connection is running slow for a bit…
Just to be clear, the loudness leveling data is provided by the server/cloud. Some TIDAL tracks don’t have it yet as they are generated on-demand when someone first plays them. The way to tell is generally if the “seekprint” visual seek bar thing is present. A flat seek bar means there’s no data yet.
Thanks Elan! I must have just been getting lucky on the hitting next track into songs that haven’t been played yet. Discover Radio was taking me pretty far off the beaten path the other day
I actually noticed this again today. Someone in r/liquidnb posted an album they were hooked on (https://thenorthquarter.nl/album/quarter-to-quarter FYI) and I started listening to it. The first 3 tracks had no volume levelling and then by the 3rd until the end of the album it was calculated and the seekprint was there.
I’m assuming this is the Plex Metadata Server hosting this stuff? I’d hope Tidal would just calculate these values as they add to their library rather than wait for someone to have to play it first, but I could see how you wouldn’t have the data if you want to analyse it using Plex’s algorithms so it exactly matches peoples personal libraries
