level volume for all files?

[voltron]

I'm not very tech oriented, but I'd like to know if there is a way to keep the same volume level for all files in the playlist during playback in the VLC player. Often, I find that if I adjust the volume for one file, the next one might playback at either a much higher, or lower volume. I'd like to be able to have the same volume level for all the files. Appreciate any input. Thanks

[VLC_help]

VLC has replaygain feature which you can adjust via Tools -> Preferences and Audio.

[voltron]

I don't see replaygain in audio preferences. Could you elaborate? The 'enable audio' box is checked, and the default vol is set to 100%. Otherwise there is nothing else that indicates what I want to do.
Thanks

[VLC_help]

You use VLC 1.1.9?

[voltron]

It's 0.9.2

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Update.

[voltron]

Thanks, I will. Once I have the update, how do I handle the replaygain mentioned above to set level volume - or is it self explanatory?

[voltron]

Well, I still haven't been able to resolve this problem. I'm still hoping that there's a way to adjust the level on the VLC player so that all files play at the same volume. The replaygain has two options, track and album, and I don't know exactly what they refer to, but I selected each and nothing changed.

[JoanTheSpark]

I ran into the same problem (music videos from youtube) and it seems to be related to 'replay gain tags' in the files that replay gain is based up on.
Anyone know how to manipulate those tags in video containers, or create them at all?

As far as I understand it you would need to use the [Track] setting to get all files from a playlist played at the same loudness level, but this only works if the audio has got a replay gain tag (mp3s and ogg files do have those if done properly.. if not, there are tools to add them).
The [Album] option will keep the relative loudness difference between the files in an album (I assume the files in the playlist are considered to be in the same album for this, if not this whole thing falls flat on it's face anyway) and only adjust the overall loudness of the 'album'.

At the moment I'm playing around with aacgain (v1.9) and trying to feed it some flv containers I got here.
It can only handle mpeg 2 layer III files.. one file that sticks out and is louder than all the others is mpeg 2 layer II though..

I wish there was some tool that would work on all files in a playlist that could do something similar to aacgain, just independent of the codecs that had been used for the audio streams.
I'd happily wait 10 min for a playlist of music videos to be scanned and to gather replay gain information and the result to be stored in the playlist file (*.xspf) to be used as replay gain tags.

Anyone know how to do this?

[JoanTheSpark]

Looks like aacgain won't help me.. 70% of the files are mpeg 2 layer I or II.

[JoanTheSpark]

Hm.. it seems this functionality IS ACTUALLY ALREADY built into VLC.
What did I do to find this?
I downloaded Audacity + the ffmpeg im/export lib (get it to read the video containers) and looked at the wave-form display..

ACDC - Thundstruck (most of the files wave-forms I got look like this):


Puretone - Addicted to Bass (quiet files look like this):


I then looked around Audacity for means to amplify the Puretone track to the same level as the ACDC one.. easy: [Effect > Amplify] brings up a dialogue which suggests a gain of +13.5dB for the whole track (without clipping) and personally I did went for +16dB to make it look like this:


Back in VLC with this new knowledge I played around with the audio settings in the preferences to get similar results:
[Replay Gain mode] > Track
[Replay Preamp] > 16.0


Now playing the files of different loudness actually amplifies the quieter ones up to the same output level as the louder ones and I'm happy.