by JoePublic » Tue Sep 18, 2018 12:52 pm
Just a word of caution: Sometimes it's a lot more than a slight volume variation. If one track of a two-track "unreleased" album gets adjusted by -14.1dB and another one by +0.1dB because the sources were way different, the -7.0dB Album Volume won't be very appropriate for either track at time of playback. Also, there is no easy way to get rid of an Album Volume value. Once that field gets populated, you can't easily unpopulate it.
What I do is analyze each track separately (or in groups that don't constitute all the "unreleased" album tracks) so that Album Volume doesn't get written. Then, if all the Track Volumes are pretty close to each other, then I just leave them in a single made-up album name. I use "(no album)". If there are a few outliers, I group those together as "(no album 2)", etc. Then I can Analyze the volumes again if I want, or not, but my groupings are set up to insure that "bad" Album Volumes don't get applied later on (by accident, or whatever). With a very large music library, I've learned it's better to get things set up the best way at the outset rather than have to clean up a mess later on.
The other thing is, in my experience, it seems like MediaMonkey always uses the Album Volume value during playback, unless the value doesn't exist, in which case it uses Track Volume. I know that isn't how it's supposed to work (based on what I have read), but to my ears, that is how it works. So IMO the Album Volume value is actually pretty important. Again, that is my subjective view based on what I hear. If one of the Gurus has something to say about that, I'd love to hear it.
Just a word of caution: Sometimes it's a lot more than a slight volume variation. If one track of a two-track "unreleased" album gets adjusted by -14.1dB and another one by +0.1dB because the sources were way different, the -7.0dB Album Volume won't be very appropriate for either track at time of playback. Also, there is no easy way to get rid of an Album Volume value. Once that field gets populated, you can't easily unpopulate it.
What I do is analyze each track separately (or in groups that don't constitute all the "unreleased" album tracks) so that Album Volume [u]doesn't[/u] get written. Then, if all the Track Volumes are pretty close to each other, then I just leave them in a single made-up album name. I use "(no album)". If there are a few outliers, I group those together as "(no album 2)", etc. Then I can Analyze the volumes again if I want, or not, but my groupings are set up to insure that "bad" Album Volumes don't get applied later on (by accident, or whatever). With a very large music library, I've learned it's better to get things set up the best way at the outset rather than have to clean up a mess later on.
The other thing is, in my experience, it seems like MediaMonkey [u]always[/u] uses the Album Volume value during playback, unless the value doesn't exist, in which case it uses Track Volume. I know that isn't how it's supposed to work (based on what I have read), but to my ears, that [u]is[/u] how it works. So IMO the Album Volume value is actually pretty important. Again, that is my subjective view based on what I hear. If one of the Gurus has something to say about that, I'd love to hear it.