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Just sent this one... hopefully it eventually lands on someone's desk that can look into it.
I am learning more about how YouTube handles audio. Most recently, I have read somewhere that any audio that is too loud has a normalization setting applied to it to bring it to -14 LUFS. Using the "Stats for Nerds" feature, it does look like this normalization factor is specified as a percentage of the full volume. A question I have not been able to answer is whether this is a factor applied on playback (e.g. normalized dynamically to 75% of volume control setting for one video I was looking at) or whether the normalization is "hard" applied and the "Stats for Nerds" is just showing the resulting loudness based on the volume control. Is there a public document that describes any of this?
So, here's the thing... I'm trying to put together playlists and the volume is all over the place, but I have realized that it is not because you normalize volumes down (e.g. one video had a content loudness of +2.5dB and had a normalized value of 75% at full [100%] volume, but another had a content loudness of +4.5dB and a normalized value of 60% and they sounded fine one after the other); but the issue is that there are lots of videos with low volume levels that are not normalized "up". These videos with low volumes all have normalized values of 100%, but content loudness levels all over the place (e.g. -6.6dB, -7.4dB, and -5.5dB for a few videos I had in my playlist, all of which where too quiet to play next to the properly normalized videos). My own spoken word videos end up with content loudness around -4.3dB when I use the automated normalization feature in the video editing software I'm using (and have a normalized setting of 100% on YouTube).
My feature request is this: to provide some way of normalizing volumes "up" for videos on a playlist that are not loud enough compared to your baseline loudness. This could be done in many ways, but providing a "feature enable" box on playlists to allow playback to be turned up would certainly be the most universal way of doing it. This would obviously depend on the player being capable of dynamically turning up the volume past 100%. The other way would be to run or re-run normalization on videos but allow them to be normalized up as well as down. For me, providing a setting that I could tweak myself on the playlist would certainly work for what I need... but that again would require a player than can increase the volume past "100%" based on input from the playlist. I would be happy to provide an example of a playlist (or you can look up my Show #2 for a representative example... the second set is much quieter than the other sets and to hear it I have to turn my volume up, but have to remember to turn it down for the next set or I blast myself out). Thanks.
Here's my Show #2 if you want to hear for yourself what I'm on about...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcbc6Su4uUe8YlBewMJOxm5vq4qcG25e0
I am learning more about how YouTube handles audio. Most recently, I have read somewhere that any audio that is too loud has a normalization setting applied to it to bring it to -14 LUFS. Using the "Stats for Nerds" feature, it does look like this normalization factor is specified as a percentage of the full volume. A question I have not been able to answer is whether this is a factor applied on playback (e.g. normalized dynamically to 75% of volume control setting for one video I was looking at) or whether the normalization is "hard" applied and the "Stats for Nerds" is just showing the resulting loudness based on the volume control. Is there a public document that describes any of this?
So, here's the thing... I'm trying to put together playlists and the volume is all over the place, but I have realized that it is not because you normalize volumes down (e.g. one video had a content loudness of +2.5dB and had a normalized value of 75% at full [100%] volume, but another had a content loudness of +4.5dB and a normalized value of 60% and they sounded fine one after the other); but the issue is that there are lots of videos with low volume levels that are not normalized "up". These videos with low volumes all have normalized values of 100%, but content loudness levels all over the place (e.g. -6.6dB, -7.4dB, and -5.5dB for a few videos I had in my playlist, all of which where too quiet to play next to the properly normalized videos). My own spoken word videos end up with content loudness around -4.3dB when I use the automated normalization feature in the video editing software I'm using (and have a normalized setting of 100% on YouTube).
My feature request is this: to provide some way of normalizing volumes "up" for videos on a playlist that are not loud enough compared to your baseline loudness. This could be done in many ways, but providing a "feature enable" box on playlists to allow playback to be turned up would certainly be the most universal way of doing it. This would obviously depend on the player being capable of dynamically turning up the volume past 100%. The other way would be to run or re-run normalization on videos but allow them to be normalized up as well as down. For me, providing a setting that I could tweak myself on the playlist would certainly work for what I need... but that again would require a player than can increase the volume past "100%" based on input from the playlist. I would be happy to provide an example of a playlist (or you can look up my Show #2 for a representative example... the second set is much quieter than the other sets and to hear it I have to turn my volume up, but have to remember to turn it down for the next set or I blast myself out). Thanks.
Here's my Show #2 if you want to hear for yourself what I'm on about...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcbc6Su4uUe8YlBewMJOxm5vq4qcG25e0
