Is Sound Check no longer working in Music on Sequoia 15.3.1?

I just updated to Sequoia 15.3.1, and was testing a piece of software, when I noticed that the volume of some of my music was a lot louder than it had been before updating (from Ventura 13.x), and I used that piece of software to confirm that Sound Check indeed was no longer working, either with it checked or unchecked. There was NO change in playback volume when checked, with a file that absolutely should have been turned down substantially.


I believe the target volume is -16 LUFSi for AppleMusic, and I used that software to determine that indeed one of the songs was playing back at -9 LUFSi, a much higher playback volume than what I was used to with Music when I was using MacOS Ventura. The following is a screenshot of a professional limiter plugin, which shows the loudness level of -9 LUFS, as a confirmation.




MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.3

Posted on Feb 17, 2025 12:16 PM

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Feb 27, 2025 6:12 AM in response to Mitch Ryan 912

UPDATE: Sound Check is very specifically not working on 15.3 nor 15.3.1, when it comes to AIFF files that have been added to a local library. These same songs, in the library of another Mac, respond just fine to Sound Check.


I put an AIFF file on one of my Mac's, tested to confirm it did not work with Sound Check, then deleted the file from the machine (but left it in my library). Once the trash was emptied, completely removing the file from the local library, the uploaded/matched file responded to Sound Check just fine (though it would change volume when turning Sound Check off, but wouldn't respond to turning Sound Check back on until the song was reloaded to replay it).

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Feb 27, 2025 8:45 AM in response to Zurarczurx

I don't think Sound Check is that old, though Apple may have called it something else in iTunes around 2005. I didn't get my first Mac until 2011, and never turned on whatever that function was called back then (I'd have to fire up that 2011 MBP and see if it even had such a volume normalization feature).

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Mar 4, 2025 9:48 AM in response to Keaster Fitz

Thanks for the reply on this. Good to know that there's a 4th confirmed person with this issue on Sequoia, across 5 machines, and that it's not just me or my library.


I was on the phone with Apple Support 2 weekends ago on this, and we dialed it down to an issue with my files being uploaded. After that call, I narrowed it down specifically to AIFF files, as the WAV and MP3 versions of the same song from Bandcamp responded to Sound Check, but the AFF version did not.

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Is Sound Check no longer working in Music on Sequoia 15.3.1?

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