This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
iPod Sound Check is a feature which Apple uses to assist in maintaining a normal volume level across your entire range of music.
You may have noticed that different tracks from different artists will play back either louder or softer than others requiring you to quickly change the volume on your device.
This feature will normalise the volume so you no longer have to keep changing the volume on your device when the song changes.
Please note using this function will not change the audio level of the original music file.
In order to set up this option simply go to the settings area on your iOS device and click Music in the left hand column.
Upon doing so you will be presented with the information as can be seen in the above image.
Under the ‘Sound Check’ option simply change ‘off’ to ‘on’. Likewise, to disable the feature turn ‘on’ to ‘off’. By default Apple has this setting turned ‘off’.
A user will also have to enable ‘Sound Check’ in iTunes for this setting to work.
In order to activate this setting in iTunes simply go to iTunes-Preferences in the Apple Menu or Command-, as the keyboard shortcut.
Once this window has popped up proceed to the ‘playback’ tab and you will notice the third option down is ‘Sound Check’. Upon selecting this and clicking ‘ok’ to confirm your library will be processed so the feature can be applied. Again, this will not alter the original audio quality of your music.
Now you have this activated simply sync to your device and you will never need to drastically change the volume on your music again.