Google’s history with music services is almost as convoluted and frustrating as its history with messaging. However, things have gotten calmer (and slower) ever since Google ceded music to the YouTube division. The YouTube Music app has its share of annoyances, to be sure, but it’s getting a long-overdue feature that users have been requesting for ages: consistent volume.
Listening to a single album from beginning to end is increasingly unusual in this age of unlimited access to music. As your playlist wheels from one genre or era to the next, the inevitable vibe shifts can be grating. Different tracks can have wildly different volumes, which can be shocking and potentially damaging to your ears if you’ve got your volume up for a ballad only to be hit with a heavy guitar riff after the break.
The gist of consistent volume is simple—it normalizes volume across tracks, making the volume roughly the same. Consistent volume builds on a feature from the YouTube app called “stable volume.” When Google released stable volume for YouTube, it noted that the feature would continuously adjust volume throughout the video. Because of that, it was disabled for music content on the platform.