Windows Media 11 volume levelling

Appears to work by dragging down everything a great deal. I presume this is to prevent anything clipping (down is better than up, use system wave and master faders to make it loud again if you must) but don’t really understand how it gauged the best performance point: it levelled volume way too quickly to have indexed levels in the entire library. Maybe it’s a progressive thing, or maybe the data was kept even before the feature was enabled (if, in fact, that is the way this is being performed).

I would be interested to know, because regardless as to how it works exactly, their levelling kind of sucks. I’ll admit I haven’t used a library programme to manage my music for a while, but seem to recall things on Linux being that much more consistent. That was before I tottered off to CD land several months back (long story, involving a missing road case and a messy office… things still aren’t quite back to normal, that’s one of my summer projects), where you’re expected to flip the volume control backwards and forwards with alarming regularity. I don’t know if this problem would be any less prevalent if I didn’t have such a smattered collection of tracks from different genres… one would think that, in the same way all pop is mixed to sound identical, surely it would be mastered in a similarly stereotypical fashion. Or perhaps not.