Plexamp Volume Leveling Issues (clipping, distortion, extremely quiet) and Crackling

Plex Labs
1

Plexamp has been working great for me for the last couple months, but recently (within the last week or two) I’ve been having some major volume leveling issues using my Motorola G7 Power in my truck, connected to bluetooth. I haven’t tried playback on any other devices or sources - I only use this while traveling in my truck.

I’ve been using Plexamp’s “Artist Radio” option to listen to music while I drive (which I love, BTW). Before the issues, everything played good and clean, with the exception of a few tracks having a “Vinyl” like crackling sound, which I have seen reported here. However, all the tracks did play at the same volume with no distortion, albeit a little on the quiet side, which was corrected using the PreAmp. I also love the EQ in it - I got my audio from Plexamp to sound better than anything else in my Truck because of it.

My Plexamp Settings were:
Loudness Leveling: On
Equalizer: On (adjusted to my car speakers, which was mostly turning up the highs, slightly dropping the mids and leaving bass flat at zero)
PreAmp: +6
Quality: 256Kbps
Audio Interface: OpenSL ES
Limiter: On
Conversion Bitrate: 256Kbps

As I said, these settings worked perfectly aside from having some tracks sound like they were being played off a scratched vinyl record (cracking and popping).

I was able to tolerate the very few vinyl sounding tracks (I’d usually just skip them), but now PlexAmp has become just obnoxious (not trying to be harsh, but being real).

What happens now, is some tracks come through very quiet, and some are so loud there’s major clipping and distortion that makes it sound like my speakers are blown (or are going to be). As a reference, normally in my truck, a decent volume is at “8-10”, loud listening is at “14-16”, and I never normally need to exceed 17 on any source for good volume.

The quiet tracks now need to be cranked up to about 21-22 (and you can barely hear vocal tracks on them), and the loud tracks, if you’re willing to listen to it, sound loud and distorted at 6-8 (in this case, 6-8 is as loud as a normal source would sound at around 13-14).

I’m sure you can see how this becomes a horrible experience when you turn up the volume above normal levels to hear a quiet song, then the following is blasting and distorted and you need to turn it down to about 8 to match the volume of the previous song that you had to have it turned up to 20 to hear…

I figured this clipping could be caused by the preamp, so I set it to “0”. This made no difference. I tried changing bitrates around, varying from 96Kbps to 320Kbps thinking it might be a transcoding issue. No difference. Next I’m going to be doing tests with the limiter enabled/disabled, with the “loudness leveling” enabled/disabled, and the EQ enabled/disabled. I’ll report back on that when I drive around and try it today, but honestly, I’m not very confident it’ll help.

Something else I had tried, is during the clipping/distortion, I had turned down the bluetooth volume on my phone (separate from the volume on the truck). I did this test to try to determine if the distortion was coming from a loud output from bluetooth or from within the app itself. Even with having the volume of the bluetooth turned down, the sound on the louder tracks was still distorted - this tells me that the audio is over-amplified and clipping somewhere in the transcoding, volume leveling, or some other audio processing phase before it even leaves the device and gets sent to my trucks radio.

Is anyone else having this problem or similar? As stated before, everything did work great with maintaining equal volumes with Plexamp - this is a very recent issue that started for me.

I’m more than happy to share any other settings you might need to help diagnose this, or change settings around to try to find the source of the problem. Right now, I’m just doing logical trial and error with things that I believe could affect it.

Any input is welcome. Thanks!

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I have tried enabling/disabling all the feature’s I mentioned above for testing (Loudness Leveling, Limiter, EQ). Loudness Leveling and Limiter had no effect/change when enabled/disabled. Disabling the EQ reduced the distortion on the obnoxiously loud tracks, but those tracks were still way to loud with distortion. The quiet tracks are still very quiet and can’t be heard without turning the volume up way above normal. There is still a huge jump between volume on a lot of my tracks that didn’t used to have an issue.

I read that some people had good results changing from OpenSL ES to AAudio to reduce popping and cracking in the tracks. I’m going to change audio modes next to see if that makes any difference.

Once again, anyone else have volume leveling issues that they’ve resolved or are trying to?

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Changing to AAudio made no difference. I’m out of ideas. Is this something I can fix or something I should wait to be fixed?

I feel like I’m talking to a wall…

4

Hmm, this is a bit mysterious…

Is there anything else which may have changed?

Do you see the same issue on the device speakers, headphones, etc.?

Do you see the same issue with Plex for Android (which uses OpenSL)?

I would probably recommend resetting preferences to defaults (an option in the UI), and perhaps even reinstalling the app just to be sure a preference hasn’t become corrupted.

But…if you’re only seeing the issue with the truck stereo over bluetooth, that’s another important data point, as Plexamp itself, the server and your library didn’t change in this timeframe, right?

5

I can try to wipe cache, data, and reinstall the app… That’s the last resort thing I was gonna try. I haven’t tried the regular Plex app yet. I’ve currently resorted to going back to Pandora, which works fine. It’s only Plexamp that has suddenly changed.

I haven’t changed any settings on Plexamp (or my car stereo) between the time it sounded good and the time it started shooting volume all over. The settings listed in the OP is what I had been using for 2 months, and even though the crackling was there on some tracks, the volume was stable. I think the AAudio change might’ve fixed the crackling, but the volume differences are crazy. The weirdest thing is that I’ve been noticing, is it seems to setup the playlist in a way to where it’ll play a really quiet output song, then the following track will be one with a really loud output. I’ve been having to focus on what my volume is at all the time to prevent blowing my speakers…

I’ll be back on tomorrow after completely resetting the app to let you know if anything has changed. I’ll also test the regular Plex app as well with the songs I’ve been having issues with.

Thanks for getting back to me.

6

You can also post logs after your play a few tracks with wildly different volume and we can see if there’s anything obvious in there.

Bottom line, Plexamp shouldn’t randomly change behavior out of the blue :slight_smile:

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I’ve got a question for you that could also help with my testing…

When you select an “Artist Radio” and Plexamp creates it’s playlist, does the loudness leveling take place while building the playlist (like pre-analyzing), or does it take place in real time as the track plays? Also, turning on/off the limiter and loudness leveling is that in real time or is it buffered into the track before playing (I guess those are both kind of the same question)? I notice the EQ responds in real-time (with expected delay), but I’ve never noticed a difference with the other options. During my testing, I was starting new “Artist Radio’s” every time I changed an option, just in case.

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Completely clearing cache, data, and reinstalling Plexamp seemed to make a huge difference. There are still a couple songs that sounded distorted, but the volume was staying more consistent, even though the quality isn’t exactly what I wanted.

I bought a Samsung A71 5G yesterday to replace my Moto G7, so I’ll be using that from this point forward. So far, it seems to be doing fine on the new phone (A7), although I did hear a couple distorted tracks, albeit they were volume leveled.

I’ve had “volume normalization” turned off on the server side due to excessive scanning/analyzing of my music directory. Do you think turning this on again might help with the distorted tracks? Does Plexamp use “loudness leveling” data from the servers “volume normalization” data?

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I believe the answer to this is, yes.

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it’s all server side; once the analysis is complete the data is used on-the-fly during playback.

pretty sure you need to skip at least one if not two tracks or restart playback for this to take effect.

yes, assuming you mean the “Analyze audio tracks for loudness” setting. if you turned this off randomly, half the tracks will have data and the other half won’t, leading to giant changes in volume if you have loudness leveling enabled in Plexamp.

11

Thanks for the follow up and the further information on how the media is processed.

I have re-enabled “Analyze audio tracks for loudness” on my server. As I think about it, I’m pretty sure the tracks that were going crazy with volume were newly added. This is most likely the reason for the distorted tracks and crazy volume jumps, if I’m to pick one :slight_smile:

Unfortunately, my data server has failed on me a few days ago (motherboard failure), so I don’t have access to my library until I replace it.

Thanks again for the support! I’ll let you know if I continue to have issues.

1 Like
12

I’m having the same issue with bluetooth and wired. On my phone and on my pc. Craclking, sound isn’t clear, and sometime popping. Any fix for this?

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