Is iTunes "Sound Check" better than five years ago?

John,

Sound check works OK for me, not perfect, but keep in mind that when songs are mastered the amount of compression as well as the myiad of processing in the mastering process can make the percieved loudness sound different.

Also the data stream on download is probably also part of the culprit.

Try iTunes again, if you don't like it, delete it and continue to use what works for you.

😐

You can manually adjust the offending songs. Select the song, hit "Get info..." hit the options tab... volume adjustment.

The problem is, music volume is subjective. Say you have a song that abruptly ends with a high pitched female vocal at full volume. What if the next song opens with loud bass drums? That should blend perfectly right? Well, iTunes goes by the mathematical loudness but that's not what the ear hears. And then there's equalization downstream of iTunes, iTunes could have it right, but if your amp or headphones treats bass differently than midrange, that will make it sound mismatched.

All that is why there's an adjustment.

iTunes has three Sound Checks: iTunes playback, iTunes burning, and iDevice playback. They all work poorly and always have.

Some folks on this forum like the third party app iVolume:

Tired of constantly adjusting your music's volume?

I'm one of those that uses iVolume.

Works great for me!

John_Neumann wrote:

Thanks for the replies, Wolf and Sanjampet.

Yep, both of you are spot on correct about some of the dynamics that affect Sound Check. The only thing I know is that, five years ago, I didn't like it. I also remember not really being able to make manual adjustments work for me because I have music playing constantly and jumping up and running over to the Mac while an offending song is on my mind got mighty inconvenient. That's why I stuck with my CD player. ...

I think you answered my question for me. No, Sound Check is no different than it was five years ago.

Not quite what I said. I certainly expect it has improved over 5 years, I can only tell you it will never be perfect. And that is relevant because of your expectations.

The fact is, CD players do not have SoundCheck at all. But when your CD mismatches song volumes, that does not "offend your ears". And yet, oddly, iTunes does. Listening sequentially to a CD you already know, you are accustomed to those particular mismatches, so they "sound right" to you. What I'm speaking of here is cognitive bias, which is human and normal, and the thing to do is simply be aware it's there.

I too have tried playlists and was not impressed. I remember when the level adjustment (in Song Properties) came out and thought "about time". And I've never spent the time to actually try playlists again. But I did not abandon iTunes entirely simply because one of its features "is not for me", i.e. sucked. Digital playback is still the Best Jukebox Ever, with instant and searchable access to my music. CDs are in every way inferior.*

It sounds like you jumped into digital playback with both feet, found some of its features were not ready for prime time, and jumped back out. I would suggest easing back in with one foot, remembering that setup is a one-time task and it's pure profit from there.

* purposefully ignoring the question of musical fidelity, some believe compression is bad, others believe digital is bad. Not this thread.

I believe Sound Check now normalizes albums as a whole to the same level while keeping individual songs in an album at the same relative level to each other.

I've been using Sound Check for years. I was an early adopter of MP3s and I remember the early years when I'd constantly be racing to grab the volume dial on my connected stereo system to not disturb people around me.

It really depends on what kind of music you're listening to and I've just discovered that it completely wrecks music with a lot of feedback in it. I'm reliving some of my old Indie Rock albums and I noticed that the iTunes preview consistently blew my version away. Why was that? I finally figured out that it's because when you play the preview, there's no Sound Check.

I turned off Sound Check and now the sound pops like it never did before.

Don't do Sound Check if you really care about the listening experience. You just don't know what it's doing. It's not just dialing the audio down.