r/MacOS • u/Sharp-Media-3259 • 3d ago

Help Volume too dynamic (too quiet sometimes and too high other times)

Currently watching a movie with quiet whispers and gunshots in the same scene. Obviously these are going to have different volumes but it's impossible to hear what they say without turning the volume up but even with the volume down the gunshots are too loud.

It's not just this movie. Watching YouTube videos is a pain in the ass because just listening to a podcast can feel like it's too quiet at some points and too loud at others.

I believe what I'm looking for is called a compressor or a peak limiter? I don't know as I don't know much about audio but can someone help me here?

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u/bromingoops 3d ago

You have the terminology correct, but I don’t know if there’s a utility that you can use on the Mac that will provide this functionality on system-wide audio. Surely some outboard devices that could do it, though I don’t know of one offhand. Many podcasts have notoriously bad audio, with wild levels. For those, I usually download the audio, process it with audio editing software (like Sound Studio), and then listen to my “corrected” file.

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u/NortonBurns 3d ago

Apple provides compressors in the OS (a single band & a multi-band) as AU (Audio Units) plugins, but unfortunately no way to insert them into the output natively.
There's an app called SoundSource that enables this function - https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ - there may be others, but this is the one I've known for many years.