Normalizing Bluray audio?

[Anakunda]

Hi. I think I'm not mistaken that 6 channel audio level on newer blurays is almost unlistenable. I mean Effects & music brutally higher against quiet voices. I assume that audio and effects are in separate channels so I needed a way or tool to convert this audio by normalizing effect channels separately from voice channels, so that in final Voices will be approximately same volume level as effects.

[tebasuna51]

Hi. I think I'm not mistaken that 6 channel audio level on newer blurays is almost unlistenable. I mean Effects & music brutally higher against quiet voices...

It's you opinion, or your audio equipment limits.

BTW you can use a audio editor, like Audacity, to adjusts the channels volume at your preferred levels.

[Groucho2004]

Hi. I think I'm not mistaken that 6 channel audio level on newer blurays is almost unlistenable. I mean Effects & music brutally higher against quiet voices. I assume that audio and effects are in separate channels so I needed a way or tool to convert this audio by normalizing effect channels separately from voice channels, so that in final Voices will be approximately same volume level as effects.
You could re-encode the audio to AC3 with Aften and apply DRC (dynamic range compression).

[Anakunda]

You could re-encode the audio to AC3 with Aften and apply DRC (dynamic range compression).

That's not the target format. If I convert from DTS to AAC I use eac3to input.dts output.aac -normalize but the problem is eac3to normalizes all channels in same proportion. I'd prefer to normalize each pair of channels separately. Don't know if this helps tho...

[Groucho2004]

That's not the target format. If I convert from DTS to AAC I use eac3to input.dts output.aac -normalize but the problem is eac3to normalizes all channels in same proportion. I'd prefer to normalize each pair of channels separately. Don't know if this helps tho...
You can use eac3to to convert the DTS to multiple mono PCM streams, normalize them separately (with SOX, for example) to the desired level and then merge and convert to aac with eac3to.

[Didée]

I miss HeadAC3he. The time when things were easy, and all knobs were in one place.

[tebasuna51]

Or you can use AviSynth.

With a .avs file like this:

a = NicDtsSource("D:\Test\input.dts")
fl = GetChannel(a, 1).Amplify(0.7)
fr = GetChannel(a, 2).Amplify(0.7)
fc = GetChannel(a, 3).Amplify(1.5)
lf = GetChannel(a, 4).Amplify(0.9)
bl = GetChannel(a, 5).Amplify(0.6)
br = GetChannel(a, 6).Amplify(0.6)
MergeChannels(fl, fr, fc, lf, bl, br)

You can play the .avs, with mpc-hc for instance, until you have the desired channel balance. After you can encode the .avs to AAC with BeHappy.

[Anakunda]

Thanks for the idea, now yet to make sure effects are stored in separate channels and the problem is solvrd.

[Didée]

Fair enough, however linear scaling (amplify) and non-linear scaling (DRC) is not exactly the same thing. Linear scaling can be done at playback time just as well. (assuming PC playback)