I keep getting my ears blown out because of sonarr downloading quiet rips. How can I fix this? Plex doesn’t seem to have any settings to do it.
While I can’t offer a solution, it’s not that the rips are quiet. It’s most likely it’s multi-channel audio and your player/headphones is doing a bad job of downmixing it to stereo. It is probably easier to just make sure you are grabbing releases with 2.0 tracks from the beginning.
Yeah that’s why I end up playing back video content with MPV (in my case using the jellyfin-mpv-shim). I’ve bound a couple of hotkeys to enable a custom 5.1->2.0 downmix, and another to enable dynaudnorm (basically dynamic compression) so that, when I’m not using headphones, I have a hope in hell of hearing the dialog without loud scenes waking up the neighbors.
Look up ReplayGain. It analyzes and then adds metadata about the peak gains of each file, to the file, without the need to re-encode anything. Foobar2k natively supports it. Hopefully Plex also has support for ReplayGain.
VLC also supports ReplayGain information, and you can set default ReplayGain value on Android, and likely on the desktop one as well.
However to create ReplayGain you need Musicbrainz Picard or the ReplayGain Scanner function of FB2K.
This is the first thing I thought of. ReplayGain has been how this has been done for decades. It doesn’t need to reencode the file, which will reduce quality, and there are programs that will scan folders to calculate the gain for each file. Other options suggested that reencode seem unnecessary and inferior.
Is this for movies and tv shows? I fix it at the output level and leave my rips unchanged. Check your TV or AVR for a “night mode” or “dialogue enhancement” or use the “reduce loud sounds” system setting if you’re playing back an AppleTV.
If the issue is specifically quiet dialogue and loud action scenes, get a dedicated center channel and boost its volume by a few dB.
If you have Plex pass there’s a built in auto leveling setting, but it’s not available on the free version.
Alternately foobar2000 or other tools can apply replaygain but you’ll need a tender that will actually use it. I use Asset UPnP.
Tdarr is probably your best bet. Its main focus is video but it used ffmeg as the backend, so anything it supports is supported in Tdarr (theoretically)
You may need to configure ffmeg arguments in the tdarr step chain if there isn’t a default step you can use.
This, I use tdarr with the “migz convert audio” and “downmix & dynamic range compression” plugins to make sure all my videos have stereo audio channels which gives me a far more consistent experience across my devices
You could use FFMPEG to reencode the audio to a suitable audio levels without touching the video. I am unfamiliar with PLEX player though.
This guy talks about this issue and offers some solutions
