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.
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 renderer that will actually use it. I use Asset UPnP.
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.
