I thought volume levelling was supposed to help with having to constantly adjust the volume for each albums differences especially where some are recorded much louder. With it enabled I still seem to have the same disparity between albums albeit overall the volume is lower than without it enabled. Do I misunderstand this concept? Adjusting the LUFS makes no difference to this difference just the overall perceived volume. What am I doing wrong I can see it applying different settings for the albums which Roon has analysed.
That appears to be what is is supposed to do. Maybe check your settings?
For more info read these:
Adjusting LUFS to what range of values?
AJ
Any of the ones Roon has available.
It’s set as it should be nothing else I can do but it really doesn’t level anything it just reduces volume across the board from what I can hear. Each LUFS setting has a greater reduction across both but doesn’t seem to level the playing field for a lot of my music when going from one album to another. Will this only work for tracks from different albums as I don’t notice it hugely when it’s on radio or playlists which isn’t often but going from album to album the jump in volume between them is very noticeable.
I have it set to Auto, perhaps auto isn’t clever enough to manage it?
There’s a limit to how closely album/title to album/title perceived volume gets matched by volume leveling, since actual album/title to album/title dynamic range might differ largely, still.
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Try -23.
AJ
As far as I can tell there’s more to psychoacoustics than objective LUFS levels.
If I use track leveling and a rock track is followed by a silent guitar picking track, then I perceive the guitar picking track as “too loud”, apparently because I expect a single picked guitar to have lower volume than a rock band.
However, the leveling does it’s job, because when I then measure the objective volume levels they are the same for the two tracks.
It’s just that my subjective expectation differs.
Just wondering if that might be your experience as well
I already did as I said the difference between albums is still there it doesn’t seem reduce significantly with changing the LUFS.
Possibly but this isn’t comparing something like your example as I would expect that.
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Set to -23. Play your typical variety of music. Use the Signal path to keep track of the range of adjustments.
AJ
I already did this, the levelling applied change when the target LUFS is altered I can see it in the signal path and its attenuated more this is not my issue. The issue is its not levelling albums so there is still a huge discrepancy when playing one album or track and then another. So I still have to manually alter the volume by quite a large amount.
Couldn’t it be what @Marin_Weigel suggested?
I.e., if you use “album” leveling, the loudest parts of every album is matched to each other, but the loudness relation of tracks within one album is untouched and will still vary more or less.
If you want to minimize the need for reaching for the volume control, you may want all tracks to be leveled to the same volume, and not the albums’ maximum loudness.
So in this case set the volume leveling to the “track” setting. (At the cost of undoing what the mastering engineer of any one album thought about the track-to-track loudness within one album)
No this is not what I mean. It’s playing one album then another album after that’s the issue not tracks in an album. Or it’s playing isolated tracks from one album then a track from another. I have the levelling set to auto so it should work this out but it appears to not be so clever. I don’t remember it being this off last time I used it.
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I tried it ages ago and gave up for the same reasons as you. It’s especially apparent on my recorded vinyl that is at a lower level than CDs. The CDs vary greatly too. I feel your pain.
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Edit - deleted, I was wrong. It should do what you say:
Auto - Uses track adjustments when playing adjacent tracks from different albums, and album level adjustments when playing adjacent tracks from the same album.
It works for me apart from the psychoacoustic effect described above. I rarely reach for the volume except if I really do want to turn the volume up or down because my mood changes or something. Otherwise, when it just plays along, the leveling seems to do what it needs to do for me
Nothing special, I use “Auto” and that’s it. I think that the only way to get to the bottom of this is for those who say it’s not working to set up a microphone and measure the loudest part of two tracks that come from different albums. Once with “track” leveling and once with “auto” leveling. If the leveling works as expected technically, then the loudest part of each track should measure the same on the mic with both of these settings.