Maybe this is just my phone (and laptop), but volume control is irritating when some tracks are configured so that I need to set the volume to 70-80% and some tracks are so “naturally loud” that the lowest setting (5% ish for my phone) is distractingly loud.
On some of my tracks (especially for the classical music ones), within the same track I need to change the volume from 20% to 80% depending on what part I am listening to if I want to hear everything without killing my ear drums.
I get that it would be difficult to do anything about this for streaming or live audio since the phone doesn’t know in advance what the input will be, but for a pre-recorded mp3 file, couldn’t my phone do some digital signal processing?
Do I just have terrible electronic items and is this an issue anyone else experiences? Ot is this problem just harder to solve than I am expecting?
As an audio engineer, this suggestion makes my skin crawl.
Don’t apply any extra compression to your files this, it will ruin them.
Modern audio streaming services and good audio players use loudness normalization to achieve consistent playback loudness. The way they do this is by measuring the integrated loudness of each song and increasing or, in most cases, reducing the playback gain of the song to an arbitrary target (e.g. Spotify has chosen -14LUFS which is pretty quiet when you consider most pop music is mastered to somewhere between -10LUFS and -3LUFS).
OP should just find a better audio player or figure out how to enable loudness normalization.
Yeah I figured it was an issue with my software.