How to Reanalyze Playback Volume in iTunes (Sound Check)

[iTim314]

I've had a long-standing issue that I can't get rid of and hopefully someone can help.


Ever since iOS 9.3, the Sound Check feature has had issues with my music. With Sound Check enabled, music will start playing extremely loudly for about 5 seconds, then drop to it's normalized level; the same happens for older songs (70's), except they start really soft, but eventually rise to their normalized level 5 seconds in.

At first I was able to fix this by having iVolume re-adjust all the volume tags in each song file, but with every single iOS update, the problem shows back up. The only solutions is a full restore.


I want to try to force iTunes to go through it's "Determining playback volume..." process. Is there any way to force that to happen WITHOUT rebuilding my whole library, thus losing all my play counts that all my smart playlists are built off?

 

[steve62388]

Years ago I looked into this and at that time it couldn't be done. Things might have changed now though.

I'm a little bit loathe to recommend it because it's quite expensive for what it does but there just isn't anything else around that works so well with iTunes. Check out iVolume.

It's the only volume normalizer that meets all these three key criteria:
- The normalization is non destructive to the music file so it can be completely reversed.
- It can normalize AAC encoded files.
- It writes to the iTunes Soundcheck tag so those changes are carried across all your iOS and OS X devices.

EDIT: Doh!!! Just re-read your post, I see you use iVolume. Okay, well in that case I can say that I have never experienced what you are witnessing. Does using iVolume to readjust volume but ignoring current values work? Or completely erasing SC values then rescan them?