Classic Hacks: How To Fix Movies With Really Inconsistent Sound

If you’re planning on settling in for a weekend movie night over the next few days, you want to make sure that you’re not having to change the volume every minute as the scenes change between quiet dialogue and REALLY LOUD action sequences. Here’s how to fix that problem in a few different ways.

Our original story and the video above mainly focused on the manual way to control audio normalisation in VLC Player. There are a few different ways to tackle this problem below, but here’s the main one:

  1. Head to Tools > Effects and Filters and click on the Compressor tab.
  2. Without changing your TV’s volume from its usual spot, find a quiet scene in the movie and raise the Makeup Gain slider until the volume is at a comfortable level. This will boost the volume of the entire movie so you don’t have to change your TV or computer’s volume from its usual setting.
  3. Raise the Ratio slider all the way up. This will ensure that any sound over a certain volume threshold will be turned down to a level you set.
  4. Without changing the volume, find a loud scene in the movie and start playing it. Lower the Threshold slider until the sound is at a non-earthquake-inducing level.
  5. Lastly, move “Attack” up to about 50ms, and “Release” up to about 300ms. This makes everything a bit more fluid, so your movie will change volumes when necessary but it will happen a bit more gradually.

Of course for an easier, though less nuanced solution, you can just click through to VLC’s ‘Filters’ tabs, and enable ‘Audio Normalisation’. If you’re watching Netflix or another type of movie streaming on your PC that can’t be watched through VLC, you can also take advantage of Windows’ inbuilt audio normaliser.

Open the Control Panel on your PC, click through to Hardware and Sound and then select Manage Audio Devices under the Sound subheading. From here, select the device you’re using and click Properties, then under the Enhancement tab scroll down until you can check the box next to ‘Loudness Equalization’.

Some smart TVs will even have a similar setting, so it’s worth having a look through your sound menu if you’re having a similar problem while watching things on the big screen.

Lifehacker’s Classic Hacks is a regular segment where we dig up the most popular, useful and offbeat advice from our archives and update it for your modern lifestyle.


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


2 responses to “Classic Hacks: How To Fix Movies With Really Inconsistent Sound”

Leave a Reply