I keep getting my ears blown out because of sonarr downloading quiet rips. How can I fix this? Plex doesn’t seem to have any settings to do it.
If you have Plex pass there’s a built in auto leveling setting, but it’s not available on the free version.
Alternately foobar2000 or other tools can apply replaygain but you’ll need a tender that will actually use it. I use Asset UPnP.
You could use FFMPEG to reencode the audio to a suitable audio levels without touching the video. I am unfamiliar with PLEX player though.
Is this for movies and tv shows? I fix it at the output level and leave my rips unchanged. Check your TV or AVR for a “night mode” or “dialogue enhancement” or use the “reduce loud sounds” system setting if you’re playing back an AppleTV.
If the issue is specifically quiet dialogue and loud action scenes, get a dedicated center channel and boost its volume by a few dB.
Tdarr is probably your best bet. Its main focus is video but it used ffmeg as the backend, so anything it supports is supported in Tdarr (theoretically)
You may need to configure ffmeg arguments in the tdarr step chain if there isn’t a default step you can use.
This guy talks about this issue and offers some solutions
Look up ReplayGain. It analyzes and then adds metadata about the peak gains of each file, to the file, without the need to re-encode anything. Foobar2k natively supports it. Hopefully Plex also has support for ReplayGain.
