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Quiet Victories Won In the Loudness Wars
Stowie101 writes with a few pieces from an article on what's been happening in the fight against over-compressed radio music and deafening tv commercials: "The first major step towards the elimination of heavily-compressed music could be the International Telecommunications Union's ... measurement of loudness that was ... revised in 2011. ... Acting to rectify the problem on the broadcast side of the issue, many European and Asian broadcasters are adopting loudness standards that are based on the criteria first introduced by the ITU. Here in the U.S., the federal government has also been proactive to improve the quality of broadcast television. By the end of 2012, the broadcast community will have to follow the CALM Act that requires commercials to be played at the same volume as broadcast television. In terms of music and recording, these broadcast standards do not apply. But Shepherd theorizes the measurement standards will be applied to the production of music. 'Measuring loudness, in general, isn't easy. Now the ITU has agreed on a new "loudness unit:" the LU. You can measure short- and longer-term loudness over a whole song. They've also agreed on guidelines for broadcast; what the average loudness should be and how much you can vary it. The recommendation has been made law in the U.S. for advertisements and is also being adopted in the U.K. and all over the world. All the major broadcasters here — Sky, the BBC, ITV — have agreed to follow the standard.'"
We really don't need all this extra layer of oversight here, the industry is capable of regulating itself once people have had more time to make their opinions known and choose stations whose practices they agree with.
post?
This is the perfect example of what is wrong with the US system. This does not belong as a law. There is no harm to people. It tramples on free speech.
But someone found it annoying. And now we have another law. More costs. Less freedom. And no real gain.
For ads, just stop buying stuff made by those companies, problem solved. or stop watching commercials at all, i guess what most people do now.
For music, what's the problem at all? If people like that kinda music, compressed to shit, let them listen. Doesn't hurt me any, it's just top-40 crap anyway. I'll just listen to good music that isn't compressed thats better music anyway not some talent free crap.
Do we really need more more more more laws to tell us what we supposed to like and what not? I can decide by myself what to like thank you!!
"Now the ITU has agreed on a new "loudness unit:" the LU. You can measure short- and longer-term loudness over a whole song."
This already exists, it's called RMS (Root mean square). Stop inventing meaningless terms like VU and LU. And honestly, these standards will probably just be ignored just the same as 80% of the other standards that no one follows with television sound already.
"But Shepherd theorizes the measurement standards will be applied to the production of music."
Ha! The labels control the industry and the labels will NEVER apply these standards to music production.
I get most of my entertainment from the Internet. ...
You Tube
Netflix
profit
WhatMeWorry!
"By the end of 2012, broadcast televisionâ¦"
Broadcast what?
Oh, I think I've heard of this. It's like YouTube if you could only choose one of 6 videos to watch, someone else decided when to hit "play" and they made you watch 3 minutes of ads for every 7 minutes of video.
The summary is conflating so many issues.
Yes, loud commercials are obnoxious.
Yes, overly compressed music diminishes it. In a good listening environment a nice dynamic range is good.
But compression isn't inherently bad. Large dynamic range stinks in my car, which is loud (I need to do something about the gasket by the driver's window). It stinks on the crappy speakers on my netbook and the built-in speakers on this display I'm using now.
It can help (with a limiter) in having to keep going to the volume bar too, or for watching a movie at night when you don't want to wake the kids.
If anybody wants some automatic control for PulseAudio I hacked up a workable solution last summer, just 'cause I got annoyed one day. PA makes it a bitch to install these things, but I've got an SRPM at least for the library. Need to write a short doc and send the patches upstream still, but drop me a line if you want it anyway.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm a broadcast tech at a license-funded TV station in Norway, so we don't have to deal with advertising volume jumps, but in general, we aim to follow the already-established EBU recommendation 128, which specifies loudness.
Indeed, the spec is publically available: http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf
toresbe
Great. Now what are they gonna do about the loudness wars being waged every day by the children in my neighborhood? I finally got the brats off my lawn, now can they get 'em to STFU? It's like living in the Amazon basin next to a colony of howler monkeys.
Lets not forget we are NOT talking about file compression here but audio Compression that adjusts the gain on an audio analogue input.
Leaving out the discussion of Ad loudness, I always marvel at the many different ways that compression can be used in audio production. It's so easy to get it wrong and I always give it a lot of attention when I produce audio. There is aart in it :-) and the thing about using compression right is not to crush the transients that give music dynamic range. It terms of an emotive response this is the difference between turning music up (because it's exciting to listen too) or down (because it's a compressed moosh of noise).
Talking Heads "Stop Making Sense" and Tool's "Anima" are great examples of compression used properly but even these recordings can be butchered by a crappy psychoacoustic file compression. I think the differences are what produce many differences of opinion on this subject. Waveforms such as crash cymbals and ambient sounds are generally ruined by this processing especially when it is close to a more significant transient sound. I do listen to a lot of music so I may be more sensitised to it than most but the lossy way mp3 (and other formats) makes me wonder when we will start to have a conversation about the quality of this form of compression.
It would be great to be able to start talking about the music again instead of the media.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Give me compression or give me death!
Everything should just be produced/engineered/mastered with the Replaygain 89 dB target in mind. All albums should come out needing zero correction to meet that, leaving all the more dynamic range intact. All TV soundtracks should be that loud, too. Movies used to follow a similar standard, and should again.
We really don't need all this extra layer of oversight here, the industry is capable of regulating itself
Yeah, we do. There are a lot of really stupid people out there that will fuck everything up for everybody if they think they can make a quick buck doing it. I like having as much freedom as possible, but this is yet another case that has already proven to to require the government to step in and tell the retarded children to quit playing with the gain knob and just focus on hawking their crap.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Is it a quiet victory to have your proposal announced on /. which has so many readers that simple links to source articles have been responsible for bringing entire websites down???
for audio sensitive individuals everywhere! wink wink nod nod
Music is compressed because it's played in crappy environments: low end players, cars, etc. These days, cars come with compression features in their sound systems so that you can listen to something more high-end such as classical without breaking your ear drums in the loud sections in order to hear the quiet sections at all. Back in the day there was an astute observation that rock should sound great on a crappy radio.
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/12/03/1512249/House-Passes-TV-Commercial-Volume-Bill
You never expect irony, do you?
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@iyfwrestling
All I know is that God damned rap coming from the car beside me at the stop light is too fucking loud.
And if they could force those aholes who crave attention on their bike toys by making so much noise it rattles you in your own home to reduce it to reasonable levels I'd really appreciate it. You can ride a bike without being a bone rattling prick.
Since we can't count on the music companies to fix the problem, what can the customer do to fix it himself? Is there some reasonable algorithm that could be implemented to take overly compressed music files and transform them to a reasonable approximation of their original uncompressed state? For example, if you have a clipped peak, one might expect that the width at the top, where the peak is clipped, and the slope on each side of the clipped section could be used to reconstruct the peak.
This seems like a great open source project.
RMS and loudness aren't the same thing.
Movies have started to improve with THX certification. Over compressed crud doesn't pass muster. Now if we can get THX certified CD recordings to match.
An explosion sounds impressive in the movies due to the dynamic range. An explosion on McGuyver does not rattle anything because it is compressed so talking is loud enough. If TV didn't compress programs, the commercials would be at explosion levels.
The truth shall set you free!
People need to remember that one of the reasons the "loudness wars" started in the first place was producer/label/artist A wanted his song/album to sound "louder" than producer/label/artist B. The question is, why?
A very simple answer: "louder" is almost always perceived as better. It's about standing out above the rest.
Take for example - given a set of 20 songs played in a club, all at roughly the same "loudness". Along comes one track which is "louder" than the rest. Chances are very high that more people in the club will take notice of this track. We're predispositioned to perceiving anomalies in our everyday lives, so something that is out of the ordinary (e.g. the louder track in this example) grabs our attention more than the other tracks. And at that point, the crowd would go "man, that track is really pumping".
The other issue is that the mastering engineer (who makes these kinds of calls about how "loud" or "hot" a track is before getting burnt to the master) is being paid to do something according to his client's needs. So if the producer wants the track louder, and is the one footing the bill, then there's not much the mastering engineer can do. So if the paymaster wants a loud track, that's what he will get. If mastering engineer A sticks to his guns, the producer's just going to go to another mastering house, which will mean revenue lost.
Another way to put it - if the customer wants to buy Windows NT and is dead set on this, no amount of enlightening by the consultant about the benefits of a Unix-based platform is going to change what the customer wants.
So yeah, these two factors combine and the result: the loudness wars.
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
That's a very fitting description; "the old and the dull". I could not agree more, that's exactly how I view people that watch TV these days. My parents generation still watches TV, but everyone else I know and my siblings stream/torrent their content.
I remember reading this article about an ABC executive and her daughter, it described the new reality very well:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/business/media/04hulu.html?_r=1&ref=global
As a fellow Norwegian I wonder how long it will matter? While your employer, Norwegian Public Television and Radio (NRK) is very innovative with its open source, free BitTorrent and multi-platform content streaming I foresee a bleak future. I imagine the costs are simply going to skyrocket with the future demands for streaming and development.
Small European public broadcasters like ours are bound to either lose their access to license funding, have to accept commercials or must ask parliament to introduce new licenses that cover online media and platforms such as smartphones, PCs and other devices.
I don't see that happening in Norway at the moment due to public opposition to such "unfair" taxes. It would be far better if it was done over the national budget without the extra cost of invoicing students, families and the elderly. As one of the many that don't have a TV, don't pay the TV license and rarely watch your content, I strongly oppose more licenses. I would not mind paying a fee if I actually watched your content.
Replaygain isn't RMS. It uses RMS as a starting point for its calculations - but it also takes psychoacoustics into account. One thing it does is use sort of an equalization curve while measuring the loudness, that compensates for how humans perceive different frequencies. We perceive a tone measuring x dB at 1 kHz as being louder than a tone of x dB at 15 kHz. Just as 1 example. It also takes into account variations in loudness (aka dynamics) within a track - louder and quieter segments of music. I'm not sure of everything the algorithm takes into account, but it's way more intricate than a simple RMS measurement. Feel free to look up the spec for yourself if you want the specifics.
I also find that it's generally very good. I have a large collection of music (180 GB) that's all RG scanned. Everything from ambient music, to classic rock, to metal, to hip-hop, to Britney Spears. ReplayGain does an amazingly accurate calculation, so good that I can put my player on shuffle and not run into loudness problems.
I also frequently make "mixtape"-type playlists for people and like to put all tracks to the same volume. I use ReplayGain's data for this. Very rarely do I need to make any manual adjustments - never any more than 2 or 3 dB on a track. Without RG, you're talking about variations of up to 12 or 14 dB between tracks from different albums.
"Some people are actually ripping vinyl because some labels are releasing vinyl with more dynamic mastering."
I've seen this. The last few Rush CDs were sonically crushed. I just got their latest (Clockwork Angels) on vinyl, and the dynamic range is practically back to 1980s levels. I also got The Cult's Choice of Weapon (a nifty set with one full LP plus a 12-inch 45-RPM EP on white vinyl) which is a bit compressed, but definitely not crushed. It's faintly ridiculous that LPs are becoming the premium format, even though I'm quite sure that CDs can sound better when mastered properly -- but okay, at least it's possible to get my hands on a non-crushed version of the recording. I'll take it.
I've wanted a way to put this in mathematical terms:
If LU > X then AGE > Y.
(If loudness is greater than some number X, then your age is similarly greater than some number Y.)
Yes, that was my point as well, I am very aware of their excellent streaming and the NRK Beta bittorrent offers. If I were interested in using them I would not mind paying, as I mentioned in my first comment.
NRK has in fact asked for a license fee on all PCs, capable smartphones and TVs for this very reason. I understand the logic behind that request. It was denied and for good reasons. It is not "fair" to require non-users to pay for a service they don't want. The current license is tied to the ownership or possession of a TV set, and has no ties to actual usage or [TV] content provider preference.
I cannot understand why you would even contemplate extending this license to cover other boxes, that is if I understand you correctly? What my device is capable of is irrelevant in my opinion, if I don't drive on toll roads should my car still pay for it? I realize this is how we finance public road works, but toll roads specifically only charge an access fee when you use it.
In my mind it should either be fully financed over the national budget or entirely commercially funded. We have very capable commercial providers already. The public broadcaster role is culturally valuable, but very expensive for a small nation. Perhaps too costly when we consider the public purse's shortcomings? I would rather have access to the PBS content on demand at a fair price per item/time period.
I realized too late that there's an even funnier way to put this. (Sorry...)
At the risk of killing the joke, that's "If it's too loud, you are too old."
Get it? LU stands for "Loudness Unit," but UR stands for "you are"?
Hahahahah!
The French "Television Regulator" finally put this on paper too.
In the early 90's the first move was to convince non public TV Chanel to stop changing volume on advertising It clearly improve but that wasn't perfect
Today the new regulation (thanks to Digital terrestrial television) is for channels to stop changing volume and to harmonize volume between all channels
Thanks for the correction. I'd been ignoring Replaygain based on misinformation, it seems.
The problem is not that we are missing some metric to calculate the loudness, that is pretty easy to define, and has been used to develop counteracting measures in ReplayGain and EBU R128 compliant loudness scanners.
The problem is that the production of music is so atrocious, most of popular and metal music is compressed into such a tiny dynamic range. Some is even clipped to digital fullscale, leading to horrible artifacts when listening. This is nothing which can be fixed by a law, it is simply (deliberate?!) bad engineering. As long as this keeps up the loudness war will not end.
From the last few pop(?) albums I listened to (Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Mars Volta), it seems that we, the listeners, are still losing big time.
I don't know why campannella pulled his "Choice of Weapon" dynamic remaster/delipped release although he may be working on V4 of the improved version (the original Choice of Weapon CD release is a horrible abortion - hideously compressed by some deaf record company fuck into severe clipping), but campannella's done a shitload of others that are currently seeded as you can see here:
http://www.demonoid.me/files/?category=0&subcategory=All&quality=All&seeded=0&external=2&query=dynamic+remaster&uid=0&sort=
[Btw, Demonoid will allow several (>5) free torrents per month to non-members (number becomes MUCH higher if you have a dynamic IP ;)]
It's not a cure, but it's a hell of an improvement over that some of that hideously compressed shit the music-hating mafiaa memebers puke out and still have the balls to call music.
OMG, Richard M. Stallman and loudness are not the same thing?
Terrible news! However will you measure his rhinophytonecrophilia?
now we will have under-volume commercials, trying to tell you something of mild interest, and once you turn up the volume .... THEN COMES THE NORMAL VOLUME
Day late, dollar short, Congress. I asked DirecTV for this years ago. They blew me off. The next thing I did was to cut the cord. Haven't watched a lick of TV since. My wife and kids complained at first, but after 3 years of pure on-demand shows via Netflix, they can't bear "real" TV anymore. On a recent vacation there was a TV with cable in the room. My wife clapped her hands and switched it on. In the middle of a blaring commercial break. You should have seen her scramble after the toddler, who had walked off with the remote, in the rush to switch the set off again.
I have read that millions of others have cut the cord, too. If that trend continues, it won't be long before cable is forced to change or face total implosion.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Oh, I agree, there's no doubt that public broadcasters have an important role to fill, that is if they are financially and politically viable. I am not certain the costs are justifiable.
It is clear that commercial channels would never be interested or able to produce the same content. Their track record has proven as much. I personally have no particular interest in any of them, I am only interested in [some of] the studio-produced content they purchase and broadcast. It's only that content I wish to purchase/view on demand at my leisure and device of choice.
News and other reporting is perhaps something that should be separated from the public broadcaster's role as a source of entertainment? I see no reason why purile reality and quiz shows have to be produced by the public broadcaster. TV2 has already taken upon itself the 24h news channel role.
It is my opinion that the "independent" role will be less important in an online media age where the alternatives are free and numerous. NRK may retain its status as our premier and official news source, I see few threats to that status regardless of party politics and who dominates parliament at any given time. The license hardly guarantees that role, but I do see your point. I believe it is a more fundamental aspect of our society; trust and reciprocity.
I feel we should explore other options and evaluate a commercial business plan for NRK. One that would increase revenue without the "tax" label in ordinary consumers' eyes. Feel free to charge customers the present amount for the same service if people choose to purchase this service.
Full disclosure: I vote for the Conservative Party, but I have no desire to change our present political system or societal course. The beauty of the Scandinavian system is its stability and lack of short term political fluctuations.
Yes? That's why I oppose any such tax... that's what I wrote above.
I do not want them to charge anyone a license fee. It's either done over the national budget or not at all.
Hobby Lobby started putting out Christmas decorations this month. In June. I've decided not to shop there until they take them down.
Exactly. RMS is a lot hairier.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
That doesn't change my view of the TV as a very limited and passive device. I'm sorry if I offended anyone.
I would also like to point out that in my country most people have access to plenty of bandwith at very reasonable prices (Scandinavia). We have Netflix-like services and PVR/DVRs here as well.
I should have been more precise, it's slightly unfair to claim it's just "old people". It's not just about age obviously, my apologies.
While people on Slashdot are generally more technologically capable, the general population is less so. Age is a factor as well as income and education. It would perhaps be more fair to say that [within the general population] the oldest and poorest are both more likely to use traditional television services. They might not be aware of the possibilities or simply don't care.
Like you I'm not wasting my time or money on services I don't want. If I want access to Discovery, NatGeo or BBC documentaries and programmes I want those and nothing else. For now I'm content with my iPlayer and BitTorrent access. It would be better for everyone if I could pay and access the content directly [at a fair price].
The "loudness wars" were already lost when BitTorrent made content without ads easily available to people in general. Heck, I generally don't like loud music or noises in my TV-shows, so I wrote a little script...
The only argument you can make for it not to be is to argue that you don't need CD quality.
In which case, you've now killed the music industry.
a baby's cry can be ignored... but the baby will just try again, and louder (MUCH louder).
Clearly we need to have the government regulate baby noise emissions, for the sanity of adults everywhere.
It wasn't like this when I was was a bit younger...wtf happened ? i don't know since I don't watch that much tv (netflix, streaming and more). but today, it's getting ridiculous, the volume levels are over the roof when it comes to commercial, I actually have to turn the volume down or use mute since it's really annoying me. This marketing tactic shouldn't be used in the first place.
Most digital TV's already have a DSP built in, why can't we just have them normalize the audio instead of lawyering up?
Let's go further. What about dropping the volume on over-compressed sound in proportion to how compressed it is? This would solve the problem in short order. Put the feature in "new high fidelity" radios too. Apply everywhere and the loudness war will end in a whimper.
I come here for the love