iVolume

listen to music hands-free

iVolume User Manual

Welcome to iVolume

Thank you for choosing iVolume, the leading volume adjustment solution.

iVolume calculates the volume perceived by the human ear for each song of your iTunes music collection. Thereby iVolume gets the most out of the approved Replay Gain algorithm and adjusts your songs accordingly.

Important Notice for Version 2 Users

Just hit the "Start" button

The usage philosophy of iVolume has changed between version 2 and 3. iVolume 3 is easier to use now and much more powerful at the same time:
In iVolume 2, you had to switch to iTunes, select a number of songs, and switch back to iVolume to adjust them. In iVolume 3 it's much simpler: just click on the Start button. In its default configuration, iVolume ensures that every song is adjusted to the perfect volume level. However, only those songs that are new to iVolume have to be analyzed, making the adjustment process as fast as possible.

However, in iVolume Version 3.1 and later the Start button can be configured to fit your needs. So besides other modes, it can just work like iVolume 2 if you like.

Set and Forget

If you have some songs that need to be adjusted with different settings, you don't have to modify these settings over and over again, as you had to in iVolume 2.
Create a separate group for each bunch of songs that should share common adjustment settings. Your configuration has to be done only once, iVolume remembers all your fine tuned settings.

Advanced Group Usage

With groups and their settings there are some nice advanced usage patterns possible. If you want to completely ignore all songs that were already processed by iVolume, just do the following:

Create a group e.g. named "Already adjusted". Set its adjustment mode to "Ignore".
Now every time you have adjusted your songs, just move them into this "Already adjusted" group. Next time you launch iVolume, your new songs will automatically appear in the Default group and you can immediately start adjusting them by hitting the "Start" button. Only these new songs will be processed. Again, when finished, move them into your "Already adjusted" group.

Getting Started

Designed for iTunes

iVolume works closely together with iTunes, the most popular music player for Mac and PC. If you don't have iTunes yet, please download it now for free.

 

Sound Check

iVolume requires Sound Check to be turned on in the Playback Preferences of iTunes. This is a feature that is intended to play back all of your songs at approximately the same volume. However, Sound Check is very limited and often fails to calculate the correct perceived volume of your songs.

iVolume replaces the computed volume information of your songs so that Sound Check actually becomes very usable.

So, if you haven't done it yet, please go to the Playback Preferences of iTunes and turn on Sound Check now. If you own an iPod, iPhone or Apple TV, please activate Sound Check on these devices, too.

Adjust Your Songs

Click the Start button in the top left corner of the window to let iVolume adjust your songs.

Overview

1. Start Button

To begin adjusting your songs with the specified settings, click the Start button. In its default configuration, iVolume ensures that every song is adjusted to the perfect volume level. However, only those songs that are new to iVolume have to be analyzed, making the adjustment process as fast as possible.

2. Groups

Create groups to apply individual fine tuned settings to any specified subset of your songs. You can specify if the songs in a group should be automatically or manually adjusted or even completely ignored by the adjustment process.

3. Adjustment Settings

Configure here in detail how the songs in the currently displayed group will get adjusted.

4. Track List

The track list shows all the details about iVolume operating on your songs.

Adjustment Settings in Detail

Adjustment Modes

Songs inside groups using the default "Adjust Automatically" mode will get automatically adjusted to the perfect volume calculated by iVolume.

You may occasionally want to apply adjustments manually to some of your songs. For that purpose, move them into a new group and choose the "Adjust Manually" mode. Now the sliders in the Adjustment column can be dragged to the desired value.

Use the "Ignore" mode for songs you do not want to get processed by iVolume.

Combining Songs to Albums

iVolume's album modes permit to adjust albums as a whole while keeping the relative loudness of each album track intact as intended by the artist. Therefore iVolume calculates the average perceived loudness for all songs of an album and then applies the same adjustment value to each song. iVolume offers various options to precisely specify which songs should be combined to albums. When changing any of the album combining options, the track list immediately reflects the new settings.

With the popup you can choose between adjusting each song separately, or automatically combining every album or to define the whole group as an album.

Gapless albums can be combined, even when the group is set to separate song mode.

In album mode you can choose to exclude compilations.

Additional Adjustment

Give the whole group a volume boost.

Preferences

Master Volume

This defines the global perceived volume for your whole music collection.

Reset Manual Adjustments to 0%

To ensure proper adjustment results leave this option checked, especially if you have ever used iVolume in version 1.x before.

Modify Comments

Keep this option checked to ensure that the volume adjustments get synchronized correctly to your iPod or iPhone.

Prevent Computer From Going to Sleep While Processing Tracks

You've got the idea.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How exactly does iVolume adjust my songs?

A: iVolume is repairing the built-in 'Sound Check' function of iTunes. When turning on 'Sound Check', iTunes does a very rough analysis of songs never analyzed before and stores the information about their loudness into a tag named iTunNORM into the songs. This information is used for playing a song a bit louder or softer at playback time when 'Sound Check' is turned on. iTunes' analysis is very fast but unfortunately not very accurate so that 'Sound Check' is not usable out-of-the-box. That's were iVolume comes into the game: iVolume re-analyses every song with a professional algorithm that's oriented on the acoustic perception of the human ear and iVolume then replaces the information in the iTunNORM tag of the songs with perfect values.

Q: Is there any loss in quality?

A: No. iVolume does not re-encode your songs. It just replaces the information in the iTunNORM tag with perfect values, and this information is used at playback-time to play a song a bit lofter or a bit louder whenever 'Sound Check' is turned on in the playback preferences of iTunes (or iPhone, or iPod, ...).

Q: I have used iVolume but the 'Volume Adjustment' sliders for my songs are still set to 'None' in iTunes - why?

A: Don't confuse the 'Volume Adjustment' sliders with 'Sound Check'. iTunes offers two ways to adjust the volume of songs. The manual 'Volume Adjustment' slider is in the 'Options' tab of the song information dialog. But iVolume modifies the 'Sound Check' information. This value can be seen in the 'Summary' tab of the song information dialog; it's labeled 'Volume'. For best results, the manual 'Volume Adjustment' sliders have to be set to 'None' so that they do not interfere with 'Sound Check'. But iVolume can check this for you automatically.

Q: Do I need iVolume to play my songs?

A: No, you just let iVolume run once (or every time you've added new songs) over your library. Then you play them as usual with iTunes, your iPod, your iPhone or your Apple TV. You just have to make sure to turn on 'Sound Check' in iTunes or on your playback device (iPod etc.) so that the adjustments of iVolume have any effect.

Q: Are protected AAC songs bought from the iTunes Store (.m4p) supported?

A: Unfortunately there is no way for applications to read raw sample data for copy protected songs. If this would be possible, it would not be a copy protection anymore. But to calculate the perceived loudness of a song, iVolume needs to read the sample data of that song.

So the only way to (automatically) adjust copy protected songs is to remove their copy protection. But because that's against the law, we can not recommend that.

If you put copy protected songs into a group in iVolume whose adjustment mode is set to "Manually", you can at least adjust these songs by hand.

Normal AAC songs or "iTunes Plus" songs (bought from iTunes Store without copy protection) are working fine in iVolume.

Update: Please note that the music businesses finally decided to sell their music without copy protection in the iTunes Store. Purchased music can be updated to the "iTunes Plus" format. Please see also this blog entry.

Q: Can I burn adjusted Audio-CDs?

A: Yes. You have to use iTunes to burn the Audio-CD. In the burning dialog of iTunes there is a checkbox 'Use Sound Check'. Turn that on to burn volume adjusted Audio-CDs.

Q: How do I solve 'No iTunNORM Tag' warnings?

A: Please download and install the latest version of iVolume. This ugly 'No iTunNORM Tag' message is history.