This has been driving me nuts for a really long time. I’ve been hearing a lot of clipping artifacts when playing music through spotify on my PC. All these while, I assumed this was due to the source file uploaded on spotify being spotty.
I was today years old when I made the link that most songs that I hear clipping artifacts were songs that are low in volume. Turns out, the normalize volume setting in preferences will attempt to boost the volume of these songs (as the option is supposed to do) but introduced a fuck tonne of clipping artifacts into it.
Its a useful function but the volume normalising algorithm is broken on spotify.
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I always disliked this feature on Spotify. I can swear that it messed up dynamic range in the songs somehow, because with this setting on, parts of the song just sounded… wrong. That said, the last time I used it was probably 2 years ago.
Replay gain is great when implemented properly. But at least then, Normalize was kind of borked on Spotify.
turn it off on tidal too
Not in my experience, unless you use “Loud” setting.
Actually, I captured the output of the app when playing “Anne Sophie-Mutter / Vivaldi: Le quattro stagioni / 12. L’inverno: III Allegro”, which has:
Loudness, Sample peak, RMS -19.0 LUFS, -0.49 dBFS, -24.24 dBFS - capture_norm_off.flacand I got literally the same data, to the sample, with normalization turned on.
When I find that the normalize volume setting is just turned back for some reason. Like, I knew it started sounded quiet again recently but couldn’t figure out why.
Normalization makes zero sense as long as you have a functioning volume control.
Sorry for a car analogy, but that’s like saying that cruise control makes zero sense as long as you have a functioning gas pedal.