With volume levelling enabled (at the default setting of -14LUFS), occasionally some albums play with a volume levelling value of +0.0dB.
This happens with albums from Tidal, and when it does, there are usually multiple versions and only some are played too loudly.
Roon radio will occasionally pick these badly levelled albums instead of the sensibly levelled versions, and suddenly Iām listening to very loud music (which was what I was hoping to avoid by turning on levelling in the first place).
One album I see this with is āNot in Chronological Orderā by Julia Michaels, which has 5 different versions on Tidal, 2 of which have incorrect volume levelling for me. There are many more.
For this particular album (and Iām too lazy to hunt for others right now, so canāt necessarily generalize), if I apply progressively stronger volume levelling, the level adjustment shown in signal path will remain at 0.0 until I pass -18LUFS, at which point properly levelled tracks are quite quiet.
With volume levelling turned off, the different versions sound the same to me, so it doesnāt really make sense to me that there would be a roughly 10dB difference in volume after levellingā¦
Will Roon @support comment on this at some point? Itās been over a month, I still get frequently blasted by broken volume levelling.
Is this forum not the official support resource for Roon? I very much appreciate the community responses, but this isnāt a problem community members can fix.
I donāt use Roon radio, but if it works similar to a playlist, then it would be better to use the ātrackā setting, not āalbumā. The āautoā setting should also work, if Roon correctly detects track/album sequences.
Thanks - but itās still broken regardless of setting.
Still broken on the latest release, still occasionally getting blown away by the occasional extremely loud song.
This is made more annoying by the fact that Roon sometimes freezes/crashes when focusing after being minimized, but thatās a popular bug with a post all its own.
I suspect that the problem is caused by the erroneous tags in Tidal / Qobuz. Roon uses track / album gain which are put in the track tags. I suspect that for albums with problems, instead of the tag being missing (and Roon applying the setting āif loudness is unknownā), the value ā0ā appears in the tags and then Roon applies this value.
Unfortunately, I canāt check this, because Roon only displays information about tags for local files, not Tidal / Qobuz ones.
Thank you for the report. Please know the team has an open investigation into this volume leveling issue and your reports have by no means vanished into a black hole.
Weāll post here once we have a more fruitful update, and thank you for your diligence and patience thus far.
Iāve noticed that occasionally when this happens (but not always), when a song in my playlist is followed by a song with the levelling problem, that the signal path doesnāt properly update on the song transition. It will show the blue āenhancedā star, and the volume levelling values from the previous song, but it will be very loud. If I restart the song it will still sound the same but it will now show the purple ālosslessā star, and +0.0dB.
Unsure if thatās a useful data point or not.
If thereās any more information I can provide to help, just let me know.
The Metallica Lux Ćterna single is another example, although there is only one listing of it in Roon and on the Tidal app. It clearly needs leveling but shows +0.0dB.
