Summer doesn’t seem to be slowing down YouTube activity regarding testing and implementation of new features. As you may remember, a few days ago we told you that YouTube Music released a new design that in some aspects (especially the sidebar) quite resembles Spotify (which is quite logical, I add) and just yesterday we had proof that the company also launched the international rollout of its long-awaited podcast feature.

It is logical that Google decided to step on the gas with regard to YouTube, because since its inception streaming at the beginning of this decade, experienced strong competition in these types of services, mainly on Twitch. And when it comes to music streaming, it has to face established market rivals like Spotify and Apple, so it has to keep improving until music is seen as an alternative by regular users.

So today we find another novelty, this one in test mode, which TechCrunch is calling out, and that YouTube is testing a feature called “Stable Volume” which, as its name suggests, aims to be a combination of a normalizer and a compressor, therefore ensuring a smooth volume output during playback, avoiding the common and unpleasant crackling caused by sudden changes in volume.

Shortly after posting the tweet you can see above this paragraph, YouTube has confirmed that this is a testhas no definitive function: «We’re currently testing a new listening control feature on YouTube that allows users to have more consistent audio while watching videos. […] The experiment is global and across all mobile devices.«. However, despite this statement, not all accounts have access to this feature, so it’s possible that this rollout is progressive, or that it’s only available to premium account users. In any case, the feature seems to be able to normalize both the audio between different parts of the video (since the feature is set in the playback settings menu) and between different videos.

As the report rightly states, normalization is more appropriate when talking about audiovisual content than when playing music, although it is important to mention at this point that this applies in particular to certain genres such as classical and soundtracks, symphonic rock, post-rock and generally compositions that deliberately “play” with these differences. In this regard, Jaime Altozano explained it perfectly in the following video: