I don't know what the technical metadata field in the file is called but within the Music app it's called 'volume adjust' and can be seen by right clicking on a track, choosing Get Info and then going to the Options tab.

This turned out to be due to a setting on the individual MP3s which tells some players to turn them up or down. I would still prefer to fix them in Music though as it's a nicer interface. If there was, though, i don't know why it would go up and down so much within an album.ĮDIT - I downloaded Elmedia player and they all play fine in that - same volume. So the issue is definitely with the playback in the Music app rather than the files themselves, unless there is some metadata Music is reading and adjusting the playback volume accordingly.

I opened a 'quiet' one and a loud one in Audacity and the peak db is the same in both, and if I listen to them out of Audacity they sound the same volume.

When i listened to them on the old laptop, they were all the same volume (with maybe a slight difference on an album-by-album basis but nothing like this). It also doesn't happen with every album - just most albums. It's not an exact quiet-loud-quiet-loud-quiet-loud alternation btw - sometimes it might go quiet-quiet-loud-quiet-loud-loud for example. If it was that one album was louder than another, I could maybe understand it, but for it to alternate within an album, I just don't understand. I've tried switching on the Sound Check option in the Preferences, but it doesn't make any difference - it doesn't seem to do anything in fact. I brought over my MP3 collection from my old Thinkpad and imported into the Music app.įor most albums, the tracks alternate between being normal volume and really quiet. I've just started using a Mcbook Air(Big Sur, 11.5.1, M1 chipset) after being a Linux/Windows user for years.

Audacity mac big sur