Tidal and Volume Leveling [Resolved]

I notice Roon only does -1dB for tracks from Tidal for Volume Leveling.

I was playing around with Vol Leveling on and off, and when on, I noticed that Tidal tracks played louder than anything in my Library.

We’re working with TIDAL to get leveling data from them for their catalog. It hasn’t arrived yet :frowning:

Volume leveling seems to really neuter the sound on my system. As soon as I disable it the sound quality soars. Something is wrong here.

I’ve normalized the volume level as part of my ripping process (when it is still WAV) and thus the level is not stored in MP3 (ID3) tags. Does Roon look for specific tags? Does the volume leveling work without tags? (I could always try to e.g. run MP3Gain over everything, if necessary).

For whatever reason my listening pulls in a lot of Tidal content. Anything from Tidal is much louder than my MP3 songs. I possibly don’t notice the difference if FLAC or M4A (iTunes) are played, but those are also a minority of my local collection.

Turning off volume leveling works best at low volume levels, but neither enabling or disabling it works for anything louder right now.

Questions:

  • is the displayed leveling value the applied leveling? (or does it indicate how “far” the source is from target?)
  • anything I can do to my files to make things better?

I feel that my MP3 files are already “low” volume (normalize -a -12dbFS) and Roon appears to make them another -10dB quieter.

Or is this purely an issue with Tidal and not my local files?

Details about my MP3 ripping:
https://kimmo.suominen.com/docs/mp3-howto/

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Yes I am a new user to Roon and I immediately noticed the problem with volume levels from Tidal being significantly louder than from my FLAC library…any suggestions how to overcome this would be gratefully received.

My wife who was sitting next to me nearly jumped out of her chair when i switched from a library flac film to a tidal stream!

I usually just have volume leveling disabled – for me that works better than having it on. Might be different with your library.

The other thing I do is try to stay within Tidal or within my own library. That’s not too difficult when browsing and adding to queue. However, the radio interface doesn’t have the Tidal logo display, so it is more difficult there.

Any updates?

It’s very annoying when a Tidal track comes in right after a locally leveled (volume adjusted) track.

Renders Tidal as unusable for the radio feature. No issues with full album sampling in Tidal before I buy it and add to my CD or LP collection.

Yes, actually. TIDAL started sending replaygain values to us recently. Our current alpha build has Roon consuming them. I’m expecting to release that to everyone early next week.

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Brian… Thanks for the update.

side topic: Certainly cool if a large catalog’s Replay Gain data is viewable to Roon Customers.

After getting everything working in my system with Roon and Vinyl Studio for ripping vinyl, I signed up for Tital Hi-Res. I have upsampling to 24x192 selected for all formats of lower resolution so that all output matches the native mode 24x192 of my Lynx HILO Reference AD/DA. CD all play fine without headroom adjustment (turned on but set to 0 for monitoring). First Tital tracks I played were at least 6db higher vol than anything else I had - and the clipping indicator is constantly flashing. I can adjust the Line In Trim on the HILO to compensate but Roon still thinks its output is clipping. Finally just set the headroom to -6 or -9 to have it match playing a commerical CD without headroom enabled. From reading the old posts this issue looked like it was solved. Can someone tell me whats going on - best way to handle this. Tital sound in standard 16x44 is great - good as CD, not as good of course as my vinyl ripped with state of the art equip at 24x192, but very, very good. I searched the Roon site but you do not have keywords to find this topic - does it have to be open and current to come up?

Hi @Alfred_Linthicum ----- Thank you for the report and sharing your feedback with us. The insight is very appreciated!

Moving forward, may I kindly ask you for the following:

  1. A screen shot of the signal path coming out of Roon when you are making this observations.

  2. Can you please provide us an example of TIDAL content that you are noticing this behavior with.

-Eric

Will do – Your reply is so late re: my post (I thought you had forgot about it). Original comment are correct, but after the latest update to Roon, Tital is still about 3-6 db higher level than my other content, including CD’s, but NOT exceeding 0 db and causing constant clipping (before I had Headroom on, set to 0 so I could see clipping and it was on constantly with Tital content).

Now, same setup, 0 db, monitor clipping, but no clipping is being detected by Roon at all – althought the peak levels are right at the limit based on the peak metering monitor of my Lynx HILO (who’s setup has remained constant) – the levels never actually hit 0db where clipping would occur. I assume either Roon institutes some changes or Tital did.

I’ll do the snapshot you requested right now (I have all content below my HILO’s native 24x192 set to be upsampled) and put it on the forum.

Signal Path:

DSP setting for headroom

Actually, this is first time I’ve tried it with build 244, and levels seem to be about the same as the rest of my content now. Great job by you or Tital (or both). Snapshots I put up are for build 244.

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