Inconsistent audio levels in SMPlayer

[rado84]

When I play a movie, I noticed that the sound level are inconsistent - voices of characters are too quiet but when there's music or environment sounds (for instance the thunders on "San Andreas" (2015) when the shaking starts), these sounds are so loud that I have to reduce the sould level to very low position which makes hearing the voices of the characters almost impossible. I've set the player's audio output for 2.0 channels (altough my hardware is 2.1) but that doesn't change anything. Am I missing something here?

[catweazel]

Am I missing something here?

Options > General > Audio tab > Volume normalisation

Failing that, get yourself a cheap graphic equaliser and sit it on your desk, plug it between the audio out and the speakers or external amplifier.

[jimallyn]

Sounds like you need a bit of compression and/or limiting. pulseeffects will do that. Read about it here:

https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/05/p ... -wide.html

And download it here:

https://github.com/wwmm/pulseeffects

[Hoser Rob]

I've never found SMplayer to be bdifferent from other media players when it comes to this. Maybe the software you're used to normalized by default?

I use smplayer as my default for video files and have normalization off by default, but for most TV shows or old movies I'll shut it off. They're pretty compressed anyway and normalizing them causes distortion.

Myself, I don't use things like pulseeffects if they have to be installed via ppas. I have very few of those for app software and none for system releated things like this. If it's not in the repos ... ie properly QA tested ... I'm going to assume it's not reliable.

[trytip]

@catweazel +1 for the volume normalization that is the single most important thing about smplayer that works. OP must be watching some yifi movies that has not been optimized for 2 speakers

vlc has compressor also but doesn't work as good. click the eq button or as they call it extended settings in vlc where you can enable equalizer and compressor

[Hoser Rob]

... vlc has compressor also but doesn't work as good. ...

VLC doesn't work as well as smplayer anyway. IMO it's the most over rated program I know of. If I still had Windows I'd use VLC there as a music player but for video, no. SMplayer was my default video player in Windows too when I still had it.

I think that some sound quality issues with video playback may be caused by many videos having POUNDING bass levels, esp. when something sinister is about to happen (v. annoying IMO). And a lot of computer speakers can't handle high bass levels without distorting massively. Using a player's built in EQ and cutting the bottom octave down can solve this. Don't know if this applies t you but I think it often does.

[Flemur]

voices of characters are too quiet but when there's music or environment sounds (for instance the thunders on "San Andreas" (2015) when the shaking starts), these sounds are so loud that I have to reduce the sould level to very low position which makes hearing the voices of the characters almost impossible.

I don't think that's an smplayer issue - we have that problem on a lot of movies, esp "action"; when I download a movie or get one from a DVD, I extract the audio and fix it with "audition" (~ audacity) then re-mux it back into the movie (w/ avidemux or ffmpeg/avconv).

[Hoser Rob]

... I don't think that's an smplayer issue - we have that problem on a lot of movies, esp "action" ....

I don't think it's strictly an smplayer issue either. But that's what the OP was using and I don't think other players would be miuch better. While using audacity to fix levels would work I'm not going to extract and process the audio. Not even for Lord of the Rings.

Some videos have far too low audio levels irrespective of their dynamic range. My accidental solution was to use one of those little Chinese Tripath amps. The gain is ridiculously high ... rated sensitivity of less than half a volt and with audio with normal levels the volume rarely goes above 10:00 ... but that's quite handy for those videos.

[Schultz]

Flemur wrote:
I don't think that's an smplayer issue - we have that problem on a lot of movies, esp "action"; when I download a movie or get one from a DVD, I extract the audio and fix it with "audition" (~ audacity) then re-mux it back into the movie (w/ avidemux or ffmpeg/avconv).

I agree. I have the same problem playing DVDs on my stand alone DVD player. Not just on action movies either. With movies with songs in them, the songs are way too loud compared to the dialog. Even the Muppet Movie has this problem. But I will try the suggestion here next time I happen to watch something on SMPlayer.