Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by asdgioanionio 1039 days ago
The loudness information is derived from the file in the first place, so a smart enough player can re-derive it and normalize audio on the fly. My player (mpv) does this by calling out to libav. It can handle both live audio and prerecorded audio, using different algorithms for each case. This functionality can be enabled with config flag `af="acompressor=ratio=4,loudnorm"`. I will admit that I copied these options from examples without really knowing what they do or how they do it, but they make things much more pleasant.

It's disgraceful that even major movie studios often do such a bad job with audio mixing that I indiscriminately run everything through a filter. This is not a problem with the files I'm using; I find the same thing in the theater. C'est la vie.