So, if you want to hear the songs as the producers intended, skip this feature.)Īuto volume leveling - in the 'Crossfading and auto volume leveling' window, click 'Turn on Auto volume leveling' to have Windows Media Player 12 automatically adjust the volume level between songs to make them more similar. (On a personal note: I don't particularly like this feature since it will fade songs out before their natural end, meaning you might miss something.

Move the slider to the right to lengthen the overlap. Move the slider to the left to shorten the overlap between songs. Below, we'll go over all the different volume tweaking enhancements for Windows Media Player 12.Ĭrossfading - in the Crossfading and auto volume leveling window, click 'Turn on Crossfading' to have Windows Media Player 12 gradually fade out the song at the end and then have the next song on the playlist gradually fade in. There are two panes that contain these features: 'Crossfading and auto volume leveling' and Quiet mode.

Your mileage will definitely vary with these playback enhancements depending on your hardware and other factors, but it's a decent step towards getting all of your tunes on a (relatively) level playing field, volume-wise. For an explanation of why recordings are getting louder and louder, check out this article from NPR: The Loudness War. For example, try playing a song off of Neil Young's Harvest from 1972 back-to-back with any song off of Queens of the Stone Age's Songs of the Deaf from 2002 and you'll hear exactly what we're talking about. This helps circumvent the annoyance of having a very quiet song followed by a jarringly loud song which is a common occurrence when listening to playlists composed of tracks pulled from various albums and encoded with different parameters. Windows Media Player 12 has built-in features that help reduce the disparities between loud and soft sounds both between songs and within songs themselves (i.e. Windows Media Player 12 Volume Enhancements & How to Use Them

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