Volume leveling of imported tracks really low

[MijacOnAir]

Hi all,

I have started using MusicBee in a relative fashion and all is going good. Today, after some tests to send music to my phone I have noticed (this happens on MusicBee desktop) that the new albums I import into the library play very low and the volume leveling is set to something between -9 and -18 for each of them.

When playing straight from Windows Explorer files sound correct and same thing happens if I drag and drop them from Explorer to my phone.

If I access files settings, volume adjustment is set to "none". I don't know if there is something I am missing here because it has started happening just now. I do nothing special from other imports. This are already ripped mp3 files that I am moving from my collection to a new drive.

If anybody has any input on this I would be eternally grateful

[frankz]

Yes, volume leveling will reduce the playback volume of your files.  It's common for modern music to be mastered at a level where the volume needs to be reduced by 9 to 13 dB to be at the preferred 89dB level.  Older music is more like -4 through -6.  

It's possible that these are scanned for replaygain when they were encoded.

You can turn off volume leveling and play everything at its original volume under Edit->Edit Preferences->Player->sound effects by unchecking "normalize volume of tracks..."

You can use original values during your synch to the phone by turning off the volume leveling in the device's synch settings.

[MijacOnAir]

You can use original values during your sync to the phone by turning off the volume leveling in the device's synch settings.

Do you mean leaving the "level volume" option unchecked?

Many thanks, it seems it's working now when playing back the local files

[frankz]

I don't sync with MB, but my impression is that using "Level Volume" in the "On the fly conversion" section will reencode the tracks (convert on the fly) to permanently be at the replaygain volumes, so uncheck that if you do not want that to happen.

If you want your phone's player not to respect the replaygain tag that's in your files, then your phone's player must also have some setting to ignore it that you can turn off.

By the way, if you want to remove the replaygain values from the files all together, then you can do that under Tools->Restore original volume.

[MijacOnAir]

Very useful! Many thanks