Normalizing volumes?

Support
#1

Is there a way to normalize all the music stored in an element? I continually append new music to various elements that I re-use over and over as part of generic ‘adventure music’, ‘fight music’, ‘town music’ etc… and I have found that imported music often ends up with different volumes (peak and average). Obviously I can modify these manually, but sometimes I forget, or don’t have time, and then my players get hit with an absurdly loud piece of music…or it’s so quiet that I think it’s stopped playing.

Is there a way to normalize the volume of all the files in an element?

#2

Heya @mattdwebb1,

Have a look at your Element Player (the bottom inspector). Set the min and max playback value (to the same number here) to adjust the volume a sample plays back back in an element (relative to the other samples in that element).

i.e. take the samples that are TOO loud and lower the sliders a bit for those samples till they match in volume.

At the moment you can’t trigger a specific sample to playback from that list like the icon implies, but fixing that is the thing we are literally working on fixing right now. :slight_smile:(it works in the Online Player, but broken on the rebuild into the Web Player).

Let me know if all that makes sense and you get it working. :pizza: :robot: :hammer:

#3

Thanks, I think what you are describing is a completely manual process? I was hoping for something a bit more automated? If I have a Mood for generic day time adventuring music for my home DnD game with music borrowed from all my fav cRPGs added to an element, and I have another for night time, another for combat, another for sea travel, another for each major biome etc…and each one has dozens of imported tunes/ambiences…then managing the relative volume of those within each element (and between moods) manually is a bit of a nightmare and I honestly I can’t ever see myself getting the time to go through it all. I have found myself refraining from adding more music because it will only add more work for me to sort out.

This seems like something that can be done programmatically easily by analyzing each track at import (or afterwards) for the peak or some user specified percentile volume and then setting the volume of all tracks within an element so that the min/max are scaled to achieve a constant max volume with respect to the peak or user specified percentile. The same could be done between moods.

Does that make sense?

Right now my volumes are all over the place due to differences in the source material and I find myself constantly playing with the volume at the table whilst I’m trying to concentrate on DM’ing (which is the kind of thing that i was trying to our source with Syrinscape!).

#4

This certainly might be done. NOT something we have moved into yet, doing audio processing on our servers (yet). It might be an upload checkbox (normalise when transcoding). (we might also do pitch shifting and all sorts of other fun stuff).

Until we get onto that sort of stuff… perhaps instead you might search for something you can use to normalise BEFORE you upload… Audactiy (free), Adobe Audition (better and expensive).

Note: you are not looking to only maximise the highest peak (what we call normalisation normally), but you’ll be wanting to match apparent acoustic power.