It was really interesting and help me learn a few things but the main information was the fact that Tidal (and plex ?) uses Albums Normalisation over Tracks Normalisation. As it is for sure Album Normalisation seems a good choice, but it would be great to add the option to toogle Tracks Normalisation.
I think that for playlists users, tracks radio users, radio users DJ Guest users, well, Plexamp users, and so on, it could be a great option to add it to plex.
I for sure will use it while listening to my playlist because very often Album Normalisation doesn’t feet and fill the volume gaps between a song and another.
I think that Plexamp should use it like Spotify does :
I’m not a big album listener - rarely, in fact, and use mostly auto generated playlists to play tracks from my library. I agree 100% that album normalization just doesn’t work for people like me, it feels as if there’s actually no normalization at all.
Unless you have made “fake albums” by combining tracks from different sources into one album, that’s hard to believe.
Flip the switch to disable volume levelling, them listen to a playlist.
Then flip it on again.
I’m sure that there is still a significant improvement with levelling activated.
There is an improvement with loudness levelling, I won’t disagree with that. Especially when you play complete albums one after another. The significant improvement is a little lacking when you just play tracks, particularly when you have CD’s released well before the loudness wars, mixed with CD’s at the height of the battle. The difference is very noticeable in many cases.
The levelling is supposed to be an apparent loudness, so the tracks sound at approximately the same level, if I understand correctly. It’s not really normalization of the album so that the peak level is at a specified dB. Maybe I misunderstand the explanation/purpose, though.
The goal is “loudness” levelling, so that each album sounds about the same volume.
However, this has its limits. Particularly if you have a very dynamic mastering which has peaks in it which are already close to 0db/FS. You can’t simply raise the volume of such a file without causing distortion (clicks) at the peaks.
(for raising the volume of such files, you’d need to apply dynamic compression on them. Which is a no-no as it can drastically change the sound and “feel” of a piece. Particularly when applied by an automatic process without checks by a mastering engineer.)
That’s why it isn’t raised on very dynamic files.
Take a look at the “Preamp” value under Settings - Playback
Setting this above 0dB will exacerbate the issue with very dynamic files. Considering that this is set to +4dB by default, you’ll want to set it back to 0dB for high-quality playback situations.
(the default of +4dB is more suited to mobile devices)
Disable the Limiter as well.
The downside is of course that the average loudness out of Plexamp will decrease considerably.
–4dB is less than half the electrical power from before.
(Putting on his Audio Engineer hat) The limiter should be off by default. I’ve never figured out why it was there in the first place, and it doesn’t sound particularly good. It’s not necessary, you have a hard limiter in the digital realm anyway, when you run out of bits (i.e. 0dBfs). As long as there’s proper gain structure once audio hits the analog realm, your good.
@Tangs, and anyone else who thinks track normalisation would be an improvement, please read the report in full: https://octo.hku.nl/octo/repository/getfile?id=qLlZPGSVXFM. Track normalisation would deprive artists of artistic freedom and potentially lead to a new, track based, loudness war.
