iPod frustration

[cellio]

I wish that my iPod (nano, in case it matters) did volume-balancing for playlists. If I play an album everything's generally fine because the publishers of the album made track volume self-consistent (usually), but that doesn't help so much if you assemble a playlist from multiple albums. Publishers don't always agree on the same volume standards. It's irritating to have to adjust volume from track to track.

Editing the tracks themselves isn't the answer, unless you edit every track you might ever play. Every track is automatically part of at least three playlists -- album, artist, and genre -- along with whatever playlists you create. This needs to be a playback option, not an edit of the source data.

It seems hard to believe that this isn't there, but I can't find it. Now granted, the UI for the iPod isn't that intuitive to me [1], so it might really be in there and just not covered in the documentation that came with the iPod, but Google seems to agree that it's not there. How frustrating, and surprising.

[1] For example, I am still utterly mystified by what sequence of key-presses I accidentally issue from time to time that lands me in a "rate this song" mode with no clear way to abort.

Comments

TV too

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

I've been complaining for years that the TV has no way of leveling the sound levels for different channels, so switching channels means I need to have the sound control at the ready as well. I keep wondering if one of my friends who is geekier in the appropriate field(s) could kludge together something that would just cut off any TV noise above a set-able decibel level.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

And it isn't just between channels, but within a channel -- often commercials are louder than the shows.

A high-pass filter shouldn't be too difficult to do for someone with electronic experience. Then again, televisions are heavy and awkward to take apart. Maybe if the sound went out to an external set of speakers, it could just go through a black box that did the filtering.

[cellio]

And it isn't just between channels, but within a channel -- often commercials are louder than the shows.

TV stations do that deliberately. It's one of the things my VCR uses in its "auto-skip commercials" implementation. (Occasionally that misfires, but that's easily fixed via the remote.)

I would think that filtering the sound would be easy if your TV is part of a systemw (external speakers, receiver, etc -- easy to plug in an equalizer, yes?), and darn near impossible otherwise. I, however, am not handy with TV inards, so I'm the wrong person to evaluate the latter.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

The other noise thing that frustrates me is conference calls. There is always someone who can barely be heard, and someone whose voice is a loud shout. How hard would it be for a phone system to have everyone say a brief sentence in a normal speaking voice, and for it to adjust the volume for that person?

(I know, it fails in cases where one speakerphone is used by a lot of people, but there should be solutions even in that case)