Automatic Volume Adjustment

[mian]

I'm getting really sick of having to constantly adjust and readjust my volume to comfortable levels. Commericals are too loud, shows are too quiet. Dialog within shows are too quiet, musical/effects sequences are too loud. So while I was being annoyed by this today, I remembered an ad for an old television that promised to maintain a maximum volume and never let a commercial just blare the crap out of you. That was a really long time ago, so I imagined such tech would be easy enough to find today.

I've already googled and found Auto Volume Control, which allows you to plug a source into your line in and it will regulate volume to line out on your audio card--designed more for external sources, though I suppose I could run a line from my speaker port to my line in, and then plug my speakers into my line out. Interesting, but a little bit of a hassle.

Anybody know of anything better? Something that can monitor and adjust my computer's audio output internally?

[gEd]

try using the ac3 filter as your audio codec and enable dynamic range compression.

http://ac3filter.net/

[mian]

Thanks. I'll give it a try.

In case anyone else is interested, here's ac3filter's guide to DRC.

[dvasco]

Commercial skip would have also been a fix.

[gemmagirl]

I remembered an ad for an old television that promised to maintain a maximum volume and never let a commercial just blare the crap out of you.

Wow, you made my TV feel old. It's a magnavox, and it has the smart sound tech built in. We bought it just because it was the only TV out there that offered it. It was awesome, till we got directv - then it no longer worked. It doesn't work with the current GBPVR setup either. It only works when you use the tuner built into the TV. *Sigh* Miss it. I hope you find something that works. I'd love to know what I can do as well.

[mian]

Commercial skip would have also been a fix.

I already use commerical skipping quite thoroughly, but it doesn't help with hulu, and it doesn't help with sequences in movies and shows where there are blaringly loud music/fx sequences and teeny quiet dialog.

I'm still working on this ac3filter thing, and I gather it won't really auto adjust like gemmagirl's magnavox did (and I think it was a magnavox commercial, in fact, and yeah, it was REEEAAALLLY old, ancient. I'm not even sure color TV was in vogue back then ), but hopefully I can at least even out the decibels so it doesn't blare at me all the time.

[pBS]

i can attest for ac3 filter's drc, it does the best job of anything i've found so far...
specially with the wildly varying mp2 sources out there...[HD v.SD]
i crank it all the way up [DRC] and let it handle both ac3 and mp2 decoding and levels are always reasonable...
one drawback is a slight loss of dynamic range on the stuff that's way out of spec, but that's the problem in the first place, and i think the range is actually limited by the abnormally high recording levels and not really ac3 filter...

i output only 2 channel and even ac3 5.1 downmix to 2ch sounds good..

voice control is also in there, as well as one pass normalization...
so you should be able to get a nice balance for your setup..

[mian]

So far so good, though I'm not entirely sure I understand how the adjustments work yet.

Sadly, it doesn't help with Hulu. Curse you flash, curse you.

[sgilani]

if you use ffdshow as your audio decoder, you have many options available to you, such as volume normalization. works like a charm.