Audio normalizers aren’t certainly new. Manypopular music streaming serviceslike Spotify and Apple Music can already curb any sudden increase in loudness. There are even a few device-level apps available for your phone and computer to do exactly that. It now appears that YouTube is joining the list with its own solution to give its videos a more uniform volume for the sake of your ears.
YouTube aggregates its content from millions of creators, which makes it challenging to maintain audio-level consistency across all those billions of videos. You must have noticed when playing a queue that the volume levels often vary considerably when going from one video to another. With the addition of this new tool calledStable volume, unexpected sound bumps will hopefully be a thing of the past.
Hitting the gear icon while watching something on the YouTube app shows a list of controls like video quality and captions.A few users spottedthe new Stable volume optionin that list. While there is no official word on what it exactly does, one can infer that it is supposed to normalize the audio output of the video. We couldn’t spot it on our own devices, so it’s hard to comment on its effectiveness or if the feature will make it to the web.
When turned on, Stable volume should ideally level the sound output across the YouTube videos you’re watching. Sudden loudness changes are particularly troubling when you have yourfavorite pair of headphoneson. However, a lot of users would prefer that YouTube didn’t change or compress the audio at all for certain kinds of videos and listen to them exactly the way the creator intended, like for music videos. For cases like that, you have the option to turn off the feature from the same video settings menu.
For now, Stable volume appears to have very limited availability, which should improve over the next few days — unless it turns out to be a limited A/B test from YouTube. Meanwhile, YouTube has lately been busy making a ton of little changes to its service, frombringing back the old sorting methodtoadding the handy queue feature to its app. There are many moreways you can personalize your YouTube experienceand make the most out of your YouTube binge sessions.
