Rock on (quietly) Google adds YouTube Music feature to end annoying volume shifts Automatic audio leveling is coming to YouTube Music. Ryan Whitwam – Apr 18, 2025 4:52 pm | 15 Credit: Google Credit: Google Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Google's history with music services is almost as convoluted and frustrating as its history with messaging. However, things have gotten calmer (and slower) ever since Google ceded music to the YouTube division. The YouTube Music app has its share of annoyances, to be sure, but it's getting a long-overdue feature that users have been requesting for ages: consistent volume. Listening to a single album from beginning to end is increasingly unusual in this age of unlimited access to music. As your playlist wheels from one genre or era to the next, the inevitable vibe shifts can be grating. Different tracks can have wildly different volumes, which can be shocking and potentially damaging to your ears if you've got your volume up for a ballad only to be hit with a heavy guitar riff after the break. The gist of consistent volume simple—it normalizes volume across tracks, making the volume roughly the same. Consistent volume builds on a feature from the YouTube app called "stable volume." When Google released stable volume for YouTube, it noted that the feature would continuously adjust volume throughout the video. Because of that, it was disabled for music content on the platform. It's unclear how consistent volume differs, but presumably it won't change volume within the track and wreck your tunes. Unlike stable volume, which is enabled on a video-to-video basis, YouTube Music's consistent volume is toggled globally. Hopefully, that will make genre transitions less jarring without changing how a song sounds. According to 9to5Google, consistent volume is only available on YouTube Music v8.15 and later on Android and iOS. You'll find it under the main app settings inside the Playback (or Playback and restrictions on iOS) submenu. Or maybe you won't! Google often rolls out new features to specific app versions as a server-side update. Some listeners are seeing the toggle for consistent volume on both iOS and Android, and others are not. The only thing you can do is wait for Google to complete the full rollout. Ryan Whitwam Senior Technology Reporter Ryan Whitwam Senior Technology Reporter Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he's written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards. 15 Comments