Subsonic Forum

Hi,

when listening to music in noisy environments (e.g. over bluetooth on my car stereo) on normal volume i need to constanty change volme level in order to be able to hear quiet parts of songs. Players like Rockbox offer Dynamic Compression that automatically adjusts Output Volume according to my needs. A similar feature in Subsonic would greatly increase it's usability on the road or other noisy environments.

Thanks in advance,
kouzinger

Hi,

See this:

http://forums.stereotool.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3679

It works perfectly.

Daniel

DJC wrote:Hi,
http://forums.stereotool.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3679

It is a pity that you have to decode the mp3 and the re-encode though. It would be nice if we could normalize playlists without losing quality (ie just fixing the mp3 replaygain tags on the fly).

Bear in mind 3 things:

1. It is not a pitty if your music is in FLAC or other non lossy format (which is my case)
2. Replay gain, unlike stereotool and similars, does not adjust in- song dynamics; so a very low volume part of a song will remain low if you apply replay gain, and the same with very loud parts. So replay gain, in my view, only very partially solves your problem
3. Actually you can use replay gain in Subsonic. There is a line for the lame encoder that applies it ( search for something like "replaygain which is not lossless" and you'll get there. Or simply use MP3gain.

Try using this as your downsample command:

lame -S -h --replaygain-fast --resample 44.1 -b %b --tt %t --ta %a --tl %l %s -

I'm testing out this command currently to see if there is any difference in peak volumes. I don't have a great listening environment at work, but hopefully I will have some time this weekend to do some real testing.

The only other option is to email the jwplayer developers to see if they will add in the ability to read replaygain tags from mp3's. If that happens we will have to use a different command to retain tags when LAME downsamples.