The VideoLAN Forums

I know that VLC is used by many film festivals around the world to show a series of films, many times short films, from a playlist (not talking about DCPs here). The problem with festivals is that film mixes come in every imaginable volume level, and when playing multiple films from the same playlist, the volume levels change, sometimes drastically, from one film to the next. It is not practical for a festival programmer to have someone sit and 'ride the fader' during each showing to try to manually level everything out on-the-fly. I wanted to ask if perhaps there was a way to add an option to pre-analyze and set playback volume levels for EACH item on a playlist, so that whenever the playlist is played, the volume levels are adjusted by VLC to match a user specified level (kind of like how broadcasters, and many newer BD players do for movies using DialNorm values to normalize disc or TV programs). It would require an analyze operation before-hand, much like the 'scan' function in Adobe's Audition, to scan the audio stream to determine the ITU-R BT.1770-2 Loudness. This could then be compared to the user-specified loudness value and adjusting the playback volume of that particular file by a certain dB so the overall perceived volume of each program is the same.

Such a function would be HUGE help for film festivals. Thoughts?

Agree; was just lookin for a way to do this in VLC. Found the following:

1) Audio > Filters > Volume normaliser, "[url=https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=122234]an old audio filter for dynamic range compression[/url]". So _not_ a normaliser.

2) Audio > Filters > Compressor, the modern dynamic range compressor?

3) Audio > Replay gain. This is proper normalisation, but VLC does not do the measurement step.

So, pre-processing the files to calculate [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayGain]ReplayGain[/url] metadata and then activating replay gain in VLC, this would be doable. I think you could even calculate EBU R128 or ITU-R loudness, and save that as ReplayGain metadata. [url=https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=128891]Not into the playlist metadata[/url], though

However, what I do (for film festivals) is pre-normalise the files with [url=https://github.com/slhck/ffmpeg-normalize/]ffmpeg-normalize[/url], then just drop them on the playlist. Need to make duplicates of original files, but works 100%.

Would prefer VLC to do all of the normalisation process

It would be great if you could set the volume level in the playlist.
Your playlist might consist of external URL streams and then you cannot change the volume gain in the file. Only option is to set it in the playlist, e.g. in the xspf format.
I assume it must be possible to use an <option> element where you could specify VLC options for that particular playlist item.

I appreciate that this is an old thread but I am interested in the same issue. Have there been any changes within VLC in the last few years that address the problem?

I am interested in audio playlists of backing tracks that I intend to use to accompany live performances and it's important for the audience's sake that they don't vary wildly in volume.

If there have been no advances in this area then I will continue to manually change each track (using Audacity "Loudness Normalisation" which, unfortunately, I'm not fully confident does the job).