Confusing behaviour when using replaygain "auto" setting

Support
1

Issue description:

When using replaygain in “auto” mode I’ve noticed that track replaygain seems to be applied in some situations when I’m listening to albums and would prefer or expect album replaygain to be applied. I’ve noticed it specifically in the following cases:

  1. I’ve added more than one album to my queue. In these cases I’ve noticed that all tracks seem to have the track replaygain applied instead of the album offset - this is noticeable because the tracks I know to be quieter in those albums play much louder than I expect.

  2. I have albums by artists that have multiple versions (for example, remasters or an updated mix) and my Subsonic server (navidrome) unfortunately doesn’t distinguish between them, so when I add one of these albums I tend to remove the duplicate songs from the play queue. When I do this I notice that album gain isn’t being applied, but instead track gain is.

Ideally I’d expect “auto” mode to choose track replaygain only when neither the previous song in the queue (if available) nor the next song in the queue (if available) are from the same album as the currently playing song.

Logs:

Upload description: autoreplaygain

Additional information:

 

 

Reproduction steps:

 

  1. Set replaygain mode to ‘auto’
  2. Add multiple entire albums to the play queue
  3. Start playing a track
  4. Observe when a ‘loud’ track progresses to a track which is quieter on the album, the quiet track is louder than expected
     

Media provider:

Subsonic

Screenshots:

     

2

The mode is selected when you start playback. So if you queue songs then albums in the same queue it will behave like that.

Same is true for the opposite.

It’s not possible to handle dynamic change in the playlist, specially since you can move songs or be in shuffle mode.

And it also can’t be your solution because if you start a playlist that happens to have 2 songs of the same album it would switch when it should not.

3

Just so I understand correctly then: when replaygain mode is set to “auto”, Symfonium will decide whether to use track or album gain when the play queue is first created, and that is set statically until the play queue is cleared?

This still doesn’t explain the behaviour I’m experiencing in the two scenarios I described: in both cases it sounds like Symfonium should be using album gain but my experience is it’s not.

4

How do you start the media? Your logs does not reproduce the issue and just contains some sync.

5

I’ve recreated the issue and uploaded some new logs with the name ‘gidautorg2’.

I’ve also recorded a screen capture (with device audio) that demonstrates the issue: I play one disc of an album, add the second disc of that album to the queue, and then skip to a song which is relatively quieter on the album and transitions into the next song. It’s clear that track gain is being applied to the songs instead of album gain because the volume drops noticeably during the transition from the quieter track to the next track (which is louder).

Here’s the screen capture: https://file.io/W6fIu2VO190E

6

Ok so this is an edge case triggering Symfonium in applying the track gain as not detecting that it’s playing all from the same album.

Will be fixed in next release with a few other similar cases.

1 Like
7

Thank you very much.