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Topic: Auto leveling volume (Read 10413 times) previous topic - next topic
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Auto leveling volume

Hi,

I need help with foobar2000 settings:

I use foobar2000 all the time at home, and just love it.

In the restaurant I own, I now use Alcatech BPM Studio to play music, which s***s in my opinion. So I would love to use foobar there as well. But since it's a restaurant, it's essential that all music plays at the same volume level all the time. I know that to an audiophile it's 'not done' to level out the music, but to me it's essential in my work situation.

I've been trying to achieve this through RG, the Avanced Limiter and the Hard -6DB limiter, but I can't seem to get it right. There's no way I'm ever gonna be able to RG all about 100,000 songs on the old PC I'm using to play music at the restaurant. Besides, I often add more music.

Can anyone tell me how to set the settings right so that all music is constantly played at the same volume/level? Or is that just something I shouldn't use foobar for?

Please be aware that I'm not very good at computers and bitrates and all, and that English is not my mother tongue.

Thank you very much in advance for your help!

Auto leveling volume

Reply #2 –
That's EXACTLY what I was looking for.
Thanks a lot, lvqcl!

Auto leveling volume

Reply #3 –
It's a compressor though, within the same song the levels would be, um, leveled, but other louder music will still sound louder, no? I think your only problem with RG is to process all those songs, which you can just leave your computer processing for a while. After that it shouldn't be trouble to RG the new music you add.

Auto leveling volume

Reply #4 –

On my machine, scanning 100K songs for track gain would take about 35 hours*. But it's a fairly recent pewter, not "the old PC". Still, RG is the only way to go. New music is unlikely to be as voluminous as your existing collection, so RG'ing that shouldn't take more time than taking a few sips from your drink.


I sense a need for an auto-RG component. Is there no such thing? I think people adding new, non-RG'd stuff to their library is a somewhat common use case. In fact, it could be called "foo_argh" (auto replay gain helper). How cool is that!


*) estimation based on 1 album of 12 tracks, which took 16.2s, and 3648 tracks in library.

Auto leveling volume

Reply #5 –
I agree that RG'ing all music would be great, and maybe would be the best solution, but I calculated that that would take something like 200 hours on that (very!) old PC. So I'd have to move all those files to another, faster PC, RG them there, and then move them back to the restaurant-PC.

And yes, I've read somewhere that you can auto-RG newly added tracks. Can't remember how that worked, but I should be able to find it here somewhere.

However, in this specific case (playing music in a restaurant), VLevel appears to do the thing for me; it pumps up the volume on parts of tracks that are less loud (including the beginning of a song, since it reads ahead 5 seconds). I've been testing it for a little bit, and it seems to me that til now I hear a constant volume-level. Imo turning up the volume on less-loud parts is something that RG doesn't do.

I'll keep testing, and if it turns out that the 'maximum volume' over all songs played during an evening isn't the same, I'll RG the whole library, and then play the music using VLevel to enhance the less loud parts.

Anyway, thanks for your comments!

Auto leveling volume

Reply #6 –
> So I'd have to move all those files to another, faster PC,

Connect the two PCs with a router or direct cable, and scan from the faster one while the files are still on the older one. That would be a lot more efficient than moving the files back and forth.

Or better: place the older one's HD in the newe rone and scan from there. That will do the trick quite nicely.

> Imo turning up the volume on less-loud parts is something that RG doesn't do.
RG maintains the in-track dynamics, as it should. But a restaurant is a unique listening environment, obviously, so I'm glad VLevel works for you.

> English is not my mother tongue.
It amazes me that, often, flawless English is accompanied by such a disclaimer, while broken English often isn't. 
 

Auto leveling volume

Reply #7 –
For my own compilations of restaurant background music (to be converted to MP3 and placed on a SD card instead of playing live through fb2k on a PC) I've gone through a few variants:

1. Simply applied Replay Gain to my music. Mostly OK but too many quiet sections within songs.

2. Simply applied foo_dsp_vlevel. This was much better - but I found that 2 second buffer was too short for a few songs with quiet intros. 5 seconds was an improvement. Still a few songs were broke vlevel's levelling scheme and came out too loud - a memorable one being Robbie Williams "Millennium", which later investigation revealed was about 5 dB too loud according to Replay Gain's loudness measure, IIRC.

3. Applied vlevel to generate intermediate files encoded as lossless. Scanned these for Replay Gain then converted to MP3, applying Track Gain correction before input to the encoder. This was far better for volume consistency. Still a couple of songs in a few hundred where the vlevel fade-out is a bit obvious if it's very quiet in the restaurant. I've edited a couple of songs for length, applying fade-outs rather than having very long and somewhat repetetive instrumental solos. I still have one long song to trim down or use the radio edit and another song that features tyre-squeal during the intrumentals that makes people look up in surprise.

4. I'm considering trying Joroen Breebaart's free Barricade VST plugin in the demo bundle which is supposed to be psychoacoustically aware in some regard - perhaps with some equal-loudness curve style correction to preserve target volume. It might be worth a shot as an one-pass alternative to using intermediate files and scanning those for Replay Gain before encoding.
Dynamic – the artist formerly known as DickD

Auto leveling volume

Reply #8 –
@dhromed: thanks for the compliment!
@all:

Well, I've worked something out that works - at least it works for me:

I bought an external HDD, copied all the music from the restaurant-PC onto that HDD, connected the HDD to a much faster PC, and then:
- Integrity Verfied all music;
- tried to repair the files that didn't pass the verification-test (e.g. 'inaccurate length' or 'multiple ID3v2 tags');
- kicked out the music that couldn't be fixed (some 35 files with 'minor problem - suspiciously high peak', which imo is not bad on about 100,000 files);
- and RG'ed all music.

Then I deleted all music from the restaurant-PC, copied the music from the external HDD onto it, started fb2k, turned on VLevel, and that's that!

The copying took a lot of time, but hey, you don't have to stick around for that, so I started the copy procedure when I went home at night. Swapping harddisks would've been possible too (good idea dhromed), but I'm not that much of a PC technician, so I didn't feel very comfortable with that. And since I already wanted to buy an external HDD for backup purposes, this seemed like a good solution to me. Besides, I now have a backup of all my music.

Until now I'm quite satisfied with the result. The 5 second buffer in VLevel is indeed a neccessity - I wish it could be even longer! What in my opinion is quite annoying, is that the VLevel settings get lost if you de-activate VLevel (which I sometimes do when we for instance have a small afterparty with the staff) and activate it again.

Luckily I haven't had a song that was surprisingly loud or anything like that. Well, there was this one song (can't remember which one) that in the intro has total silence except for footsteps on a pavement. VLevel of course augmented the volume, which made guests to start looking around, haha, but that's the only one so far. I kicked that one from the playlist - problem solved. And yes, every now and then there's a long intro or outro which sounds a bit different, but not to an annoying level. Altogether it works much better than the software I used beforhand. Maybe 'psychoacoustic awareness', as Dynamic put it, might work even better, but for my situation this works just fine. And if I encounter a song that doesn't seem to do OK, I simply take it out of the playlist, or even delete it all the way, since I've got plenty of other music. At home, I couldn't stand deleting just one song from an entire album, thus making it incomplete, but at work I don't mind that much.

Thanks again for all your tips and advice. Hopefully someone can answer those remaining questions:
1. can I enlarge the VLevel buffer even more, to let's say 20 or 30 seconds? Would that affect the memory-usage in a serious way?
2. can I avoid losing my VLevel settings, which happens when I de-activate it?
Thanks in advance for your reply!

Auto leveling volume

Reply #9 –
Quote from: PfPnl on
2. can I avoid losing my VLevel settings, which happens when I de-activate it?

Save your VLevel settings as a DSP preset in foobar and then load that preset instead of to readd VLevel as DSP again.

Related to your original topic: Another possible solution than to use VLevel might be the use of a VST with George Yohng's VST wrapper, for example Leveling Amp.
This is HA. Not the Jerry Springer Show.

Auto leveling volume

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Robertina on
Quote from: PfPnl on
2. can I avoid losing my VLevel settings, which happens when I de-activate it?

Save your VLevel settings as a DSP preset in foobar and then load that preset instead of to readd VLevel as DSP again.



Probably a stupid question, but how do I save my VLevel settings as a DSP preset? I've looked everywhere in fb2k, and extensively checked the forum, but I just can't seem to find it.

Thanks!

Auto leveling volume

Reply #11 –
[foobar main menu] File, Preferences, Playback, DSP Manager: Add VLevel from the list of available DSPs and configure it ("Configure selected"). Below the list of Active DSPs you find an empty field titled "Presets". Type in a name and press "Save".

This preset contains all active DSPs and their settings. To reload this settings choose "Load".
This is HA. Not the Jerry Springer Show.

Auto leveling volume

Reply #12 –
How stupid of me that I've overlooked that. Thanks very much!

Auto leveling volume

Reply #13 –
VST is is really good...
I never liked vlevel. To me it was only bearable with buffer length set to minimum. Now finally I may delete the foobar 0.83 installation with foo_dynamics. Or can anyone revive this tresure (foo_dynamics) to work with 1.x?