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I'm looking to impose a hard limit on a movie. In particular when I have earbuds in and a reasonable volume set, loud or sudden sounds (gun shot, dramatic sound effects, gun fire, etc) are loud enough to hurt. Lowering the volume makes speech and other sounds hard to hear.

Is there a third party on-the-fly solution for this, or a plug-in for VLC that I can use?

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  • That would be compression rather than normalization.
    – Hasaan Chop
    Commented Mar 21, 2010 at 17:44
  • So it is, title updated.
    – Josh K
    Commented Mar 21, 2010 at 17:50
  • good question. in theory you can do this under linux with PulseAudio or JACKd or even ALSA, tho it's not a simple setup. the ideal solution would allow for arbitrary signal processing (VST or similar) before outputting.
    – quack quixote
    Commented Mar 21, 2010 at 20:39
  • I like the response for VST plugin's on the VLC forum. "Is it possible to use a VST plugin with VLC?" "No."
    – Josh K
    Commented Mar 21, 2010 at 20:41

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I'd look at JACK. There's a source tarball for OSX on the main project's download page, and a separate OSX-specific port project called JackOSX.

JACK is a system for handling real-time, low-latency audio (and MIDI). [...] It can connect a number of different applications to an audio device, as well as allowing them to share audio between themselves. Its clients can run in their own processes (ie. as normal applications), or can they can run within the JACK server (ie. as a "plugin").

The idea here is that you'd take your audio output from, say, VLC, then run it into a compressor plugin with JACK before sending it to your audio device.

If you want to perform a real time audio processing, you will need a third party application to perform this. I used Audio Hijack.

After installing JACK, open up Audio Hijack. Make sure that you've set it up to "Hijack" the audio for a live capture.

Hijack

Next setup the audio output for VLC to JACK.

VLC -> JACK

VLC's output goes to Audio Hijack's input.

VLC to Audio

Audio Hijack's output goes to the system out.

Audio to Sys out

Lastly choose your filters.

Filters

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  • if i knew more about how to configure JACK for this i'd write up a short tutorial. hopefully someone else will come along and enlighten us!
    – quack quixote
    Commented Mar 21, 2010 at 20:51
  • I was going to say I have JACK, now to find a way to run it through the appropriate plugin.
    – Josh K
    Commented Mar 21, 2010 at 21:08
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Audio Hijack will run VST plugins. http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro/

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  • That would be awesome.... If I wanted record it. O-O. I want to play a DVD and compress the audio on the fly with VLC or a third party plug-in for VLC or a standalone application for global volume.
    – Josh K
    Commented Mar 21, 2010 at 20:33
  • You didn't actually try it, did you?
    – Hasaan Chop
    Commented Mar 21, 2010 at 22:21
  • I did but it captured a lot of internal noise and sounded quite bad. Using JACK is much better and affords more options.
    – Josh K
    Commented Mar 22, 2010 at 4:56

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