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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: Auto-gain level and zeroDB - volume level is too low

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krn3kiPRO InfinityMember since 2014
I have found out that VirtualDJ 8.2 is much quieter than other media players such as Winamp, even when zeroDB is set to default. The obvious cause for this is that auto-gain will decrease gain level in most EDM songs roughly from -2 dB to -4 dB. There is absolutely no clipping present in these song with other players and they are mostly downloaded from Beatport, so the source quality is good and one would expect that they are mastered properly.

But ok, I can live with -2 dB to -4 dB, however there are many recommendations on this forum that limiter will kick it in with default zeroDB setting and that recommended setting is actually -3 dB zeroDB. This results in very quiet signal (some songs will have 50 % VU LEVEL with -3 zeroDB) and I have to push gain very high on the mixer in that case, so I usually get questions from technical team if my soundcard is defective and if I even set the volume to the normal level.

Another problem is that VirtualDJ doesn't detect gain level properly on all songs. When zeroDB is set to default, some will have VU LEVEL peaks up to 100 %, but on the other hand, some songs will barely make it above 75 %. My controller doesn't have gain level, so that's really frustrating.
 

Posted Thu 29 Sep 16 @ 1:40 pm
AdionPRO InfinityCTOMember since 2006
Auto-gain is designed to make the perceived loudness of all songs the same, not to make the vu-meter peak at 100%

Highly compressed songs such as many EDM songs will sound a lot louder at 0dB than some soft pop-rock song. Both may peak at 100% vu meter though, so if both should have a similar perceived loudness the edm song will have to be played softer.

To preserve sound quality there's only 2 options.
-Find a controller or audio interface with a louder output signal that better matches the mixer/amplifier's input signal
-Increase the gain on the mixer/amplifier's signal as you do now. If without playing any music you cannot hear a significant increase in noise there's no problem in doing so.
 

Posted Thu 29 Sep 16 @ 2:00 pm
bagpussPRO InfinityMember since 2003

How accurate would you say that VDJs VU meters are compared to a hardware mixer such as a standard DJM900? Has there ever been an indepth comparison here?
 

Posted Fri 30 Sep 16 @ 12:01 am
AdionPRO InfinityCTOMember since 2006
There's a variety of ways to measure volume, and it's hard to say one is better than the other depending on how you want to use it.

The VU meter in VDJ measures the peaks of the audio signal and shows them on a linear scale, which makes it useful to take care of preventing clipping and allows to see when something is wrong due to a DC-component in the music that would offset the peaks louder than what is perceived.
The first analog VU meters had a slow rise time, which would have made them miss very short peaks, but makes them a little better at measuring loudness.
If loudness measuring is what you're after, there's also other possibilities such as A-weighting to get closer to human hearing.
 

Posted Fri 30 Sep 16 @ 6:35 am


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