View Full Version : Pre-amp for quiet movies/songs
I've been using my n800 as my axim x51v replacement for over a month now, and am starting to slowly get used to it.
One thing that REALLY REALLY bugs me however, is that I have found no way to pre-amp music/videos that are very quiet.
With tcpmp, it was as simple as increasing the pre-amp setting and I could make movies as loud as I please (very handy when watching videos on the subway or other noisy environments).
Other than trying noise cancelation headphones etc, is there ANY way for me to boost the volume on the n800?
Re-encoding is not really an option - I don't want to have to re-rip videos just because they are quiet :(
Any help appreciated!!
Most of the audio player apps on the N800 have a built-in volume control which is separate from the system volume control. You can stack both to increase the volume by a larger amount. If you do that and your volume still isn't high enough, then your headphones are too inefficient to use with the N800. But all of my headphones work just fine with the N800, including Sennheiser, Yamaha, Apple and Centronics noise-cancelling headhpones.
Thanks DJames1, but I do have both volume meters cranked and sometimes (quite often to tell you the truth) have problems hearing audio.
I have several different headphones (most in the $50-$60 range) and none of them work better than the other.
The EXACT same headphones on my x51v worked like a charm... (sometimes needing a preamp)
So far I haven't found anything that can do this either, but I've been struggling to find a decent media player full stop!
I wonder if we can get picard to port TCPMP to Maemo ;)
We've a glut of these bloated flashy players; We need a more technical player - Smaller, not written in python, good equalizers+per-file presetting, peak and RMS normalizers/compressors, pre-amping, filtering, better buffering (Acid Test: Being able to surf with Web with OpenTTD running in the background, and no skipping!), better playlist and file picker handling, that sort of thing...
And also the exe should be less than 1MB and the plugins less than 2MB :p
Thanks DJames1, but I do have both volume meters cranked and sometimes (quite often to tell you the truth) have problems hearing audio.
Maybe it's your hearing - listen at high volume a lot, do you? :eek:
More seriously, most of the headphones I've tried with the N800 are fairly efficient, being designed for portable use. But my Yamaha headphones certainly aren't very efficient, and some of my devices like my phone and my GPS have trouble powering them adequately. Yet I haven't had any real problem with the N800. The volume setting needed varies fairly widely between different applications, but I have no trouble getting good volume with any of my headphones.
It therefore seems odd that you have tried several sets of headphones and none of them work well. Is this only when playing your own music files? How about when you play the FM radio, Nokia sample files etc? Is it possible that your files have the volume set too low and you haven't normalized them?
Music to be honest isn't a problem for me - i never need to have the volume at full setting.
It's the movies and tv shows I watch on the subway that are sometimes hard to hear. Most of them are o-k cranked, but quite often I'll try watching a movie on the subway and it's simply impossible for me to follow the conversation.
If I was watching videos in a library, it wouldn't be a problem - but on a busy subway you NEED to be able to pre-amp :(
Cranking up the headphone volume enough to hear a movie clearly in a noisy environment like the subway is not a good idea. It will cause hearing fatigue pretty quickly, and probably cause long-term damage your hearing if you keep it up.
A much better idea is to get noise-cancelling headphones (real ones, not cheap pseudo-noise-cancelling). Mine only cost $20 on a blowout sale, but you can routinely find some models on sale for around $40-$50. These headphones do a great job of cancelling out a lot of the ambient noise and making a movie intelligible without needing excessive volume. Plus they all have a built-in amp and line volume control.
Bumping the thread to find out if there are any fixes on this? Most of my movies/videos I need to be in a quiet environment to hear the conversations in the video.
By the way, which video player is the best?
Mplayer is the fastest one, but it's kind of buggy.
amigokin
2008-04-06, 03:27
I know you don't want to read this but... until you find a solution why don't you buy an in-ear noise cancelation headphones?
Bumping the thread to find out if there are any fixes on this? Most of my movies/videos I need to be in a quiet environment to hear the conversations in the video.
By the way, which video player is the best?
Mplayer is the fastest one, but it's kind of buggy.
Mplayer has a volume gain with soft-clipping (compression). This will bring up the quiet parts in a movie and dynamically clip the peaks that are distorting
for example, this pulls up audio by 6.2 dB
mplayer -af volume=-6.2:1 mymovie.avi
(edit) what do you mean, 'buggy'?
mplayer also has softvol option. Run something like:
mplayer -softvol -softvol-max 1000 movie.avi
I don't want to buy earphones because I have already enough earphones and somebody has already the solution here.
Nice command line, but doesn't MPlayer have a config file so I won't have to retype these options in the pretty command line?
And by the way, how do I edit the application shortcuts in the OS menu? The "Panels" setting only allows me to organize the panel items, not edit them. D:
MPlayer is buggy because...
-Other windows can't draw over MPlayer while a video is playing, I have to minimize it.
-Sometimes there is no image, I need to minimize and restore.
-Can't seek where I want, only by 10secs increments (more like a missing feature)
-When I click "MPlayer", the GMPlauncher window appears and it's stuck on "Videos". I can't find a way to access my list of audio files. (again, more like a missing feature, does it actually search for all videos on all drives or the default folders to search into are set somewhere?)
*edit*
From the OSD, I opened a music file and I was left with no window in the taskbar and the music file playing with no way to close it. I have to wait for it to stop on itself. D:
bunanson
2008-04-06, 19:50
...One thing that REALLY REALLY bugs me however, is that I have found no way to pre-amp music/videos that are very quiet....
Benson has a solution for you, thread #5, for playing music. Install XMMS, it is the ONLY equalizer equipped player for the tablet. Turn the equalizer all the way up, will give you 100X/20db increase in volume.
bun
scumgrief
2008-04-06, 20:53
This is disturbing... Nobody has mentioned buying a headphone amp, this way your audio is generally being amplified by a vastly superior amplifier, it can be set at any volume without going through interface boxes on the NIT, and it helps prolong your battery life since you won't have your audio very high on the actual Internet Tablet.
Use a headphone amp on all your devices for better sound fidelity.
bobloadmire
2008-04-07, 03:28
If want to add more awesome to your life ( and volume, and 3 people) get this:
http://www.boostaroo.com/store_detail.php4?id=14
i love mine!
these can be found for less than 20 bones.
scumgrief
2008-04-07, 05:42
If want to add more awesome to your life ( and volume, and 3 people) get this:
http://www.boostaroo.com/store_detail.php4?id=14
i love mine!
these can be found for less than 20 bones.
It helps doesn't it. I'm audio paranoid so I think I might get a better more expensive one lol.... that one is the only mainstream headphone amp i've seen so far. Audiophiles wouldn't prefer per say, but its realli good from what i've understand....
This is my fifith edit tonight pretty much lol, well just realized I might be mistaken... I think I got another amp mixed up w/ that one lol.... oops, I should get some caffine or something, oh and btw bobloadmire nice review on that site ;) I just noticed that
PinCushionQueen
2008-04-07, 13:43
As Benson has already mentioned - XMMS has a pre-amp and equalizer that work fabulously for music playback.
As for louder movies - you can edit your /.mplayer/config file to allow a higher volume. I've made my config file to read as follows:
ao=sdl
softvol=yes
softvol-max=450
Hope that helps :)
bobloadmire
2008-04-07, 22:34
It helps doesn't it. I'm audio paranoid so I think I might get a better more expensive one lol.... that one is the only mainstream headphone amp i've seen so far. Audiophiles wouldn't prefer per say, but its realli good from what i've understand....
This is my fifith edit tonight pretty much lol, well just realized I might be mistaken... I think I got another amp mixed up w/ that one lol.... oops, I should get some caffine or something, oh and btw bobloadmire nice review on that site ;) I just noticed that
what review are you talking about?
scumgrief
2008-04-07, 22:53
what review are you talking about?
*blush* too many b's and o's lol Your name looks like the product name at half a glance
that work fabulously for music playback.
As for louder movies - you can edit your /.mplayer/config file to allow a higher volume. I've made my config file to read as follows:
ao=sdl
softvol=yes
softvol-max=450
Could you please explain how you did this in depth ?
As Benson has already mentioned - XMMS has a pre-amp and equalizer that work fabulously for music playback.
As for louder movies - you can edit your /.mplayer/config file to allow a higher volume. I've made my config file to read as follows:
ao=sdl
softvol=yes
softvol-max=450
Hope that helps :)
THANK-YOU THANK-YOU THANK-YOU!!!!!
This is EXACTLY what I wanted. Tried it out last night and works FAMOUSLY! You da man!
As for how to do this, simply launch a terminal window, change to the .mplayer folder and edit the config file with vi (or whatever text editor you want). Insert the 3 lines above and save. Couldn't be easier!
Re-encoding is not really an option - I don't want to have to re-rip videos just because they are quiet :(
This baffled me; I can't find many movies or TV shows that I can watch on my N800 without transcoding them. I have a few quick transcoding presets that I run overnight on my queue of videos to get them looking their best on the N800. (320x240 on 4:3 videos, 400x240 on widescreen) I confess that I also boost the audio on several of the shows I regularly watch.
I would love to know what you're downloading; are you getting "iPod-ready" videos? Or do you just put up with stuttering on the high-motion parts of the video, which can be most of the time on high-action movies / TV shows?
If you just want to boost the volume, you can actually run the video through a variety of programs that will only re-encode the audio without touching the video at all. The free program VirtualDub for Windows does this well for AVI files. Simply re-encoding the audio at a higher volume is really quite quick. Perhaps you should look for an encoder that will flatten the dynamic range of the audio -- boosting the quiet bits without boosting the loud bits. This is also known as "compression" but that can get confusing when talking about transcoding; what kind of compression do you mean? File or Audio?
I would love to know what you're downloading; are you getting "iPod-ready" videos? Or do you just put up with stuttering on the high-motion parts of the video, which can be most of the time on high-action movies / TV shows?
bingo.
coming from an axim, I must admit I was disappointed at the video playback on this unit (mind you that's the ONLY thing i'm disappointed in). whenever possible i convert my videos using the nokia internet tablet video converter software - however if i download something overnight and REALLY want to watch it on my way to work then yes, i put up with stuttering during action packed scenes.
audio levels are no longer an issue for me, thanks to the above config file entries. wish i had learned that trick from the get-go.
right now i'm biding my time waiting to see if some miraculous coder unveils software that plays all media files smoothly. the n800 is a GREAT bargain for the price, but unless i get better video playback (without conversion) i'll be moving to something with more horsepower once the price is right.
Could you explain more throughfully how to edit the config file?
I've been trying in the 3rd party file manager and I don't see the .mplayer dir in /etc. D:
Thought I might mention the pc app SUPER which is a transcoding app containing a widget that allows you to boost audio up to +50 dB. I've made use of it a LOT since getting the n800.
BUMP
Still waiting for some explaination to how to find this configuration file and edit it.
This is the simplest way I can think of to add the lines to the mplayer config
open an xterm (Menu->Utilities->X Terminal)
type:
cd .mplayer
echo softvol=yes >> config
echo softvol-max=450 >> config
To examine the file type:
cat config
If you need to edit the file you will have to use vi which is beyond the scope of this post.
Thank you! It works beautifully.
Thank you for the help. I just couldn't find the folder as it wasnt visible in the GPE File Manager or with the "ls" command. Why would they hide it? D: Is it for the same reason Windows hides system files by default?
Under Unix/Linux any file or folder whose name begins with a . is hidden by default as a means to keep directory listings clean. Most graphical file editors don't show them by default, although some have a checkbox to make them visible.
With pygtkeditor it is possible to open files in hidden directories and edit them. Otherwise you have to use xterm and vi.
On the subject of hardware headphone amps, here is a small one that was featured on engadget.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/20/fiios-e5-headphone-amplifier-clearly-admires-apples-ipod-shuff/
vBulletin® v3.8.8, Copyright ©2000-2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.