Volume Normalisation Settings per Source

[TilBlechschmidt]

While volume normalisation generally works pretty well, it can (in my opinion) be quite distracting for songs with a wide dynamic range. Especially in orchestral and choir music the wavering up and down becomes very apparent. MASS does sometimes but strangely not always store the measured loudness of a song which works around this on subsequent plays.

For local files, using replay-gain metadata works well. However, with streaming providers like TIDAL this sadly is not an option. I personally would be willing to rely on a fixed gain as mentioned in the docs:

If audio is only played from one single source (e.g. Deezer) and that audio source already has normalized its audio files, then its safe to disable normalization in MA. If audio is played from different sources or audio is not normalized at the source, it is highly recommended to leave normalization enabled for the best experience.

However, at the moment it is not possible to control normalisation per source. There exists a separate setting for radio streams but tracks from say TIDAL and Filesystem are handled the same way:

In the player-specific configuration the target level for normalisation can be configured and a toggle exists which disables it entirely:

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My proposed solution would be to convert the global normalisation / gain settings to a per-source setting. This would allow a configuration like the below example which I would want to use:

• Filesystem: Replay-gain, fallback to dynamic.
  • Assuming that all files have pre-calculated gain values embedded
• TIDAL/Qobus: Fixed.
  • Assuming that the general loudness is somewhat consistent across tracks on the streaming platform
• Podcasts/Radio/Other: Dynamic.

[marcelveldt]

What you notice is the dynamic normalizer. Once a track has been played once, we have a measurement. Maybe just disable the dynamic normalizer in your case?

[TilBlechschmidt]

Hey, thanks for the reply!

Yeah I am aware that this is due to the dynamic normalisation. My problem is that I can only disable it globally which also disables replay-gain corrections for local files (if I recall correctly; might be mistaken). Meanwhile TIDAL is significantly louder on average which makes a queue with tracks from both sources very uncomfortable to listen to*.

My argument being that tracks from different sources are likely to have different inherent / average gains and that a player-centric on/off switch + global gain/normalizer config is less useful than a source-centric ability to configure both the gain method and fallback to use.

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*Without dynamic or replay-gain based normalization loudness differences between tracks and sources will always be the case to some degree, yes, but in my experience both TIDAL and my local files are somewhat internally consistent with a "static" gain offset between the two.