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How-to normalize home volume levels with Node-RED

blakeniemyjski.com

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Re: How-to normalize home volume levels with Node-RED

#11

Post by niemyjski »

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #2

I've been doing a lot with Home Assistant lately, and lots of things that play nicely like node-red. Does anyone have a set up to manage music service playback to media players like Google Home (or I guess it's Nest now) speakers? It would be fantastic to start playing music via Spotify from the dashboard, or based on events and node-red flows. Not sure if the new forked-daapd integration will help me out here, but l…

You can kind of do this with the mini-media-player and Spotify card. I guess I need to do a write up on this. It doesn't work the greatest unless you have audio groups setup. You could define a scene with the speakers and playlist you want to play as well.

Re: How-to normalize home volume levels with Node-RED

#12

Post by anamexis »

godot wrote: post #3

I know this article is about Alexa/Echo, but I wish a feature like this is built into TVs :) I have a young kid now and she's in bed by 8:30. I'd like to watch TV in the living room in the evening after her bed time. I want to watch a movie like say, Avengers. I want to listen to the dialogue instead of/in addition to reading subtitles. The problem is in most movies, you have low volume dialogues, and then there's ex…

In addition to what others have mentioned, many A/V receivers have this feature as well. It's often called something like "night mode".

Re: How-to normalize home volume levels with Node-RED

#13

Post by jjjensen90 »

godot wrote: post #3

I know this article is about Alexa/Echo, but I wish a feature like this is built into TVs :) I have a young kid now and she's in bed by 8:30. I'd like to watch TV in the living room in the evening after her bed time. I want to watch a movie like say, Avengers. I want to listen to the dialogue instead of/in addition to reading subtitles. The problem is in most movies, you have low volume dialogues, and then there's ex…

It's probably more of an investment than other replies to your comment, but having a receiver with at least a center channel and left/right speakers does wonders to level the volume between dialogue and other sounds. My receiver even has a dialogue setting which emphasizes the human vocal frequencies on the center channel.

Re: How-to normalize home volume levels with Node-RED

#15

Post by tunesmith »

And then you have devices like the seemingly-cool Sonos One, that has two different internal volume levels, one for Alexa, and one for the music, and they're wildly different. And there doesn't appear to be any way to normalize them. Maybe you could use this to hack it by adjusting volume levels immediately before and after any music is played.

Re: How-to normalize home volume levels with Node-RED

#16

Post by rcarmo »

I've been using Node-RED for a few years now, and I can automate my LG TV's volume (handy for when the kids punch it up for cartoons) and control it via Siri (which is wired into Node-RED).

One of the medium-complexity things I do with it is check the iOS App Store prices for apps I'm interested to get notifications when they're discounted, but all my home automation runs on it, and this post has links to most of the series:

https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2019/01/13/1900

I also maintain my own Node-RED docker images for ARM and Intel:

https://github.com/insightfulsystems/node-red

Re: How-to normalize home volume levels with Node-RED

#18

Post by function_seven »

andrepd wrote: post #17

I don't get the fixation on wiretapping one's home for marginal convenience gains.

This blog post happens to use Echos to play the music. That's not the interesting part, though. Home Assistant and Node-RED are the cool bits, and they're completely local network services; no wiretapping required.

I've done a lot of automation using HA and Zigbee and Tasmota devices, and it's been awesome. I have no cloud I rely on for anything. When my Internet service goes down seemingly every night at 12:30am, I'm glad I can still control lights, alarms, etc.

Re: How-to normalize home volume levels with Node-RED

#19

Post by ZeroGravitas »

cgriswald wrote: post #5
godot wrote: post #3

I know this article is about Alexa/Echo, but I wish a feature like this is built into TVs :) I have a young kid now and she's in bed by 8:30. I'd like to watch TV in the living room in the evening after her bed time. I want to watch a movie like say, Avengers. I want to listen to the dialogue instead of/in addition to reading subtitles. The problem is in most movies, you have low volume dialogues, and then there's ex…

You want dynamic range compression, which will quiet explosions and louden whispers, usually at the expense of some minor audio quality. It’s probably already in your TV, cable box, or whatever other device.

There's often also explicit human voice boosters too.

Re: How-to normalize home volume levels with Node-RED

#20

Post by lostlogin »

godot wrote: post #3

I know this article is about Alexa/Echo, but I wish a feature like this is built into TVs :) I have a young kid now and she's in bed by 8:30. I'd like to watch TV in the living room in the evening after her bed time. I want to watch a movie like say, Avengers. I want to listen to the dialogue instead of/in addition to reading subtitles. The problem is in most movies, you have low volume dialogues, and then there's ex…

This makes me pause before going to a movies (especially when combined with the other 99 downsides). The dialogue there is normal to loud, and the loud parts are so loud it hurts. Do people want it like this?
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