iPod Volume Adjustment Bug and AlbumArt Bug

[MSIS]

Hello all, got two annoying long term problems to bring up here. I am currently using MediaMonkey version 2.5.5.996 but these problems have been around for at least 6 months.

Once on the iPod songs have a option called 'Volume Adjustment' which can be found by going into the 'Get Into' -> 'Options' setting of the song in iTunes. Basically once synchronised to the iPod from mediamonkey some songs have a volume adjustment of +100%, some have a volume adjustment of -100% and some have no volume adjustment at all or something in between.

The problem is that when songs are set to -100% even at full volume on the ipod you can't hear it and when a song is set to +100% it blasts your ears out even on lowest volume after listening to a normal song.

All the songs in my mediamonkey library have been analysed to 89dB.

I've tried checking if only certain levelling values in mediamonkey affect the volume adjustment on the ipod and there seems to be no pattern. For instance i had two songs that had a volume levelling value of -4.2dB in mediamonkey and they both had a volume adjustment of -100% on the iPod so i checked a third song that had a levelling value of -4.2dB but that song had no adjustment at all.

I can't seem to see any correlation between affected songs but the problem is widespread. I would say at least 30% of my library is affected, which makes it really hard to enjoy listening to an album when each song is such a different volume.

My second problem is that some songs 'lose' their albumart after sometime on the iPod. The albumart is still there in the tag on the iPod but for some reason when playing the song on the iPod itself there is no albumart on the screen. For this problem i can only assume that somehow the albumart database is becoming corrupted.

Not sure if these are iPod or mediamonkey problems but i just feel it needs some attention.

Cheers,

Craig.

[rusty]

Craig,

Try to:
a) factory reset your iPod
b) resynch your iPod from scratch
c) for other hints, have a look at:
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14505

-Rusty

[MSIS]

Ok tried deleting all my songs then re-synching, basically all the album arts that had gone 'missing' are now back. But some of the movies and television i have on there now have art from mp3 albums which i can't explain. Also the original problem of the 'volume adjustment' being all over the place is still there and the same songs that had it before have it again.

[MSIS]

Ok, after a bit of playing around, if you edit the volume adjustments on the ipod in itunes, then allow mediamonkey to copy the file edited from the ipod back to the hard drive the problem becomes fixed. Hopefully someone can re-create this and let me know what is going on.

A couple of questions...

Why does mediamonkey edit the volume adjustment values in the first place?

In what part of the mp3 tag is the volume adjustment value stored?

Is it possible that mediamonkey is using this part of the tag for something else and the ipod is reading this value (i assume its some sort of signed integer)?

Craig

[Sleepy]

I've had the same problem from time to time, and I have never been able to figure out the root cause. You may, however, want to check the files for an RVAD tag using a hex editor. Mp3tag and other taggers often just ignore this tag and don't even display it. I've noticed that the information in this tag, if present in a file, will get loaded into the ipod's database as the "volume" entry when you rebuild the database.

[chiefpaddler]

I've been having this problem too. Seems the IPOD randomly adjusts the volume to -100 and suddenly songs that played normal before are silent.

Does 3.X fix this issue?

FYI - the ONLY reason I use ITUNES is to upgrade firmware and to fix these volume issues (it beats resetting everythig to factory and re-synching over 8000 songs in MM)...