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?

  • dizzy@lemmy.ml
    3·
    16 days ago

    I don’t know why they don’t, I work in music rather than TV/Film but it infuriated me too! Give me a voice volume control! It would be technically very easy to do implement as a standard but the powers that be just haven’t come together and done it!

    • The_Grinch [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      16 days ago

      I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one thinking it!

      Do you think it could be done by diffing a few of the different language tracks?

      • dizzy@lemmy.ml
        3·
        15 days ago

        Unfortunately no, audio files are actually really dumb in that they’re basically just a file of 44100 (or 48000 or 96000 etc) amplitude numbers per second.

        So there’s nothing really to diff because it’s basically just a squiggly line, set of squiggly lines or, when compressed, a mathematical expression that when decompressed, recreates a squiggly line.

        You could isolate the dialog if you got ahold of a version with no dialog at all and then inverse the polarity of that and sum it with the original but it’s unlikely you’ll find a version without any vocals.

        Machine learning vocal isolation tools are probably going to be the best way to go about it as a DIY approach. Ultimate Vocal Remover 5 with the demucs 4 algo is great FOSS software to extract vocals and you could sum that with the original track and adjust the gain to get louder dialogue… it would be a lot of work though…