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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayGain - works fairly well for audio. I imagine some sort of mean average would be good enough for balancing a movie's loudness to the adverts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
Yeah, in the audio production world, it’s commonly referred to as a “compander”. A compressor for the loud parts, and an expander for the quiet parts. Commonly used in speaker phones for being able to pick up a large range of volumes, meeting rooms for remote meetings, plug-and-play ballroom mic systems, overhead announcement systems, etc… Basically anything that you want to set up once and then never worry about tuning. They can be a pain to properly dial in at first, but can be extremely useful.
Indeed this is an overly solved problem. Personally I prefer ReplayGain for music and some video-audio productions while compression is great for making voices clearer. Thinking about adverts, compression would likely be the winner for making it less jarring decibel wise.
I used an app to level my entire audio collection to 93 dB a while back. Now it's all the same loud at the same number. It just took a day of work.
There is music that benefits from dynamic range. Maybe not metal or pop or techno, but classical music and soundtracks for example.
I agree. We're talking about different things though. It doesn't level the entire track, it turns up the volume on the track (or down in this case. A lot of mine were set to 110dB) so all the tracks are averaged. It didn't change the tracks themselves. I'm not an audio engineer, I don't know the precise term. I still get, for example in edm, good bass drops, I just don't have to touch the volume knob anymore.