I’ve poked around online and it seems like Jellyfin had (music) volume normalization added to it sometime recently. However, I’m struggling to verify that it’s enabled/working. Is it something I have to enable or is it on by default? If it’s on shouldn’t I be able to see something like a LUFS or ReplyGain value in each song’s metadata?
UPDATE:
I’m not familiar with Jellyfin’s git strategy, but it seems like even though the audio normalization has made it into the master branch it has NOT made it into the 10.8.z release tag/branch. I determined this by looking for the changes in Emby.Server.Implementations/Data/SqliteItemRepository.cs from the normalization PR in the current version of the file in 10.8.z and they were not present.
It won’t. In fact, it might even make that part worse because the quieter parts would become even quieter.
What you need here is a “midnight mode” which is just a compressor; it reduces the dynamic range. Since dynamic range is an aspect of audio quality, this is not something you generally want.
Gain normalisation just ensures that different audio tracks are, on “average”, the same volume so that you don’t have to change volume all the time to accommodate the different mix of each song.
Spotify has these features for example under it’s “Normalise volume” setting; the first two settings do gain normalisation and the high setting also adds a compressor I believe.