(Image credit: YouTube)
- A ‘consistent volume’ setting is spotted in YouTube Music
- It should prevent tracks being wildly different in their volume levels
- Not everyone is getting the feature right away
Having a track come crashing in at an unexpectedly high volume level – or being much quieter than what’s come before – isn’t a great listening experience, and it’s something YouTube Music is aiming to prevent with its latest feature update.
As spotted by the team at 9to5Google, a new option called ‘consistent volume’ is now making its way to the YouTube Music apps for Android and iOS. The idea is, all your tracks, no matter where you’ve got them from, will use a similar volume range.
Loud songs will still be loud and quiet songs will still be quiet of course, but it should help with tracks that have been recorded or converted at noticeably different volume levels, so your ears know more or less what to expect.
The feature follows on from the ‘stable volume’ feature that’s been available across different YouTube apps for some time. It’s also something you can find inside Spotify’s range of apps, where it’s called ‘audio normalization’.
Slowly appearing
It seems that the consistent volume feature is being rolled out quite slowly, or perhaps just being tested with a limited group of people for now. The 9to5Google team has seen it on some of their phones, but it hasn’t shown up for the Android Authority team.
If you don’t have it yet, you’ll just have to be patient. To check if you’ve got it, open up the YouTube Music app for Android or iOS, then tap your profile picture (top right) and Settings, then choose Playback (Android) or Playback and restrictions (iOS).
Here in the UK I can’t see it on either my Android phone or my iPhone, so don’t be surprised if it hasn’t shown up yet for you. According to 9to5Google, you need version 8.15 of the YouTube Music app, so check to see if any updates are pending.
It’s certainly a feature that YouTube Music users have been wanting, with Reddit threads going back years on the topic. As yet there’s not been any official announcement about this from Google, but we’ll let you know if one appears.