On 9/20/26 19:48, Max Nikulin wrote:
On 19/09/2026 5:38 pm, Chris Jölly wrote:
since a while I am experiencing rather big changes in volume/loudness
when I listening to Soundcloud or Youtube audio.
I can not correlate this to a specific moment or change on my system
(forky).
You may try to regularly dump output of a command like
pactl list sinks
(perhaps there is a better one) to see if there is something different
after sound volume changes. Another hypothesis is that the issue might
be changed to codecs used for fragments of audio.
I would expect good codecs to preserve overall gain, but not all codecs
are good...
I think the root cause is that content creators, etc., are free to
record, process, synthesize, mix, and master audio however they please.
And, they do.
Beyond listening with "one finger on the volume knob", there are known
signal processing solutions to this problem. I have already mentioned
audio compressors. A related solution is automatic gain control (AGC),
which can be thought of as a compressor with long time settings. Linux
offers many possibilities for implementation.
That said, poor quality audio is easy for content creators. Good
quality audio is hard and/or expensive for content creators. Converting
the former into better quality audio in real-time on a client device is
hard and/or expensive for end users.
David
