SOLVED: Issue with music volume normalisation

[TurtleIdiot]

Hello,

I've recently notice something with some of the music I have on my jellyfin instance. I recently ripped and added the albums "Diamond Life", "Promise", and "Stronger Than Pride" by Sade (original 80s CDs). I've noticed that when I listen to them on jellyfin, they seem awfully quiet compared to some of my other music.

For example, if I queue Paradise by Sade and Hammer by Lorde, I've noticed that Hammer is considerably louder. When compared to streaming the tracks through YouTube Music, the audio volume just seems very uneven, where the YT Music copies sound more or less the same in volume. Furthermore, the volume from the tracks also seems about the same when I play them directly on my CD player (same two tracks).

This is a bit annoying as I like to put together playlists or throw random music into a queue when listening with thrends through syncplay.

I've already looked around and I have seen that jellyfin has support for LUFS, and my music library has it enabled. I also ran the audio normalisation scheduled task but it did nothing.

I'm running jellyfin 10.10.2 in a docker container

Does anybody know why this is happening?

Thanks

[jravin]

When you ripped the CD's were they ripped as 16-bit PCM or something similar-ish?  Asking because you said these are "original 80s CDs", and older CD's often use lower encoding.  Whereas YouTube most likely is using something else which allows it to play louder at the same settings.  So jellyfin would treat the older audio differently from newer tracks.

I am guessing Jellyfin may not apply the normalization if it thinks it does not need processing, and if the track(s) uses compression differently from newer tracks.

If jellyfin is running in a docker, or such, the container might be missing codecs or audio libraries that may alter/negate volume normalization.

Some clients will treat different sources of audio differently.  This makes troubleshooting normalization a bit trickier.  Instead of comparing to YouTube, perhaps compare to differently encoded audio files all within jellyfin.

Does jellyfin have transcoding logs?  If so ... please share.

[TurtleIdiot]

When you ripped the CD's were they ripped as 16-bit PCM or something similar-ish?  Asking because you said these are "original 80s CDs", and older CD's often use lower encoding.  Whereas YouTube most likely is using something else which allows it to play louder at the same settings.  So jellyfin would treat the older audio differently from newer tracks.

I am guessing Jellyfin may not apply the normalization if it thinks it does not need processing, and if the track(s) uses compression differently from newer tracks.

If jellyfin is running in a docker, or such, the container might be missing codecs or audio libraries that may alter/negate volume normalization.

Some clients will treat different sources of audio differently.  This makes troubleshooting normalization a bit trickier.  Instead of comparing to YouTube, perhaps compare to differently encoded audio files all within jellyfin.

Does jellyfin have transcoding logs?  If so ... please share.

Hi, sorry for getting back so late, I missed the reply notification completely.
In terms of ripping I used cyanrip with default settings
I've attached the logs that jellyfin writes out when I play Paradise by Sade, as well as the output of ffprobe for both "Paradise" and "Hammer".
I'd really appreciate it if you could tell me what could be the issue here.

Thanks

[TurtleIdiot]

Managed to solve this myself!

I think the issue was that the replay gain and LUFS metadata on my tracks either wasn't being read correctly or was wrong to begin with since I originally just dumped my files in after only ripping + metadata fetch with Picard. Ultimately, I re-calculated all the replay gain and normalisation data for my entire library, and re-imported it into Jellyfin.
The volume differences between tracks is now MUCH better and I think it fixed an issue with my whole library being kinda quiet overall which I might not have noticed until I encountered the issue with my Sade CDs being awfully quiet.
Admittedly, it is quite a nuclear option, but I was meaning to fix up some metadata and lyrics anyway, so I just did all of it in one go.