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iTunes automatic volume control can distort output
Authored by: swath on May 24, '04 07:51:21AM
"Regarding Volume Logic: It sounds impressive at first but personally I think it does more harm than good on most material. An automated processing can never replace a good sound engineer.."

I've been playing with the Volume Logic plugin for a couple days and generally concur - although it sounds good at first, and it does improve the sound of certain tracks, the plugin has a fatal flaw: it's attempting to remaster material that's already been mastered. It does a really nice job on some unmastered demo and live versions I've run through it, but most of the tracks in my iTunes library have already been through a mastering compressor. It's redundant, and you end up squishing the music.

A better, though not perfect solution to the iTunes Sound Check clipping problem is iVolume. It's slow and kind of clunky, but it does a nice job of gauging the overall volume of each track (better than Sound Check) and adjusting accordingly. Best of all, you can manually set the overall loudness to which it's setting all the tracks.

Net effect: lightly compressed classical tracks sound as loud as ultra-compressed rock and pop tracks without clipping (and without losing dynamic contrast).

Hopefully, Apple will hear people's complaints about clipping in iTunes and give us more control over the level to which Sound Check is attempting to adjust. Ideally, they'll give us control over the quality of the Sound Check algorithm, as well. But until then, it's good to see that there are developers willing to step up to the task.



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