Relative volume of in game music vs ABC players

I'd like to raise a point about the audio mix in the game.

The sound in lotro is dynamically compressed. That means the overall volume is reduced when there is tones being played that have a large volume. This can already be seen when comparing the recording of a single theorbo tone played at maximum game volume ( both sliders for player music and master volume at 100%) and a master volume of 0.04 with player music still at 100%. The amplification factor of 25 between the two is only true at the very beginning. After a couple of milliseconds the dynamic compression kicks in and the amplification factor is reduced below 20 and slowly cranks back up when the tone fades.

This has important implications: Your very same ABCs will sound different, depending on your game volume settings. The effective volume difference of the velocity levels ( +ppp+, +mf+, ..) changes depending on your game volume settings. And also this means that any ABC player can not really match what you will be hearing in the game without knowing your game volume settings. Because the dynamic compression happens on your client it'll also change the volume differences of the song based on how you are standing relative to the band... further away where the overall volume is a bit reduced you might actually have a better mix than close to the band.

You can try it out for yourself: Play at max volume settings in game with lowered windows volume and minimized game volumes vs more windows or other means of amplification ( that is assuming that your windows mixer doesn't dynamically compress the signal itself - but even then it might be using a different algorithm for the dynamic compression that may sound better ).

All in all this is something you should all try out for yourselves: Try playing around with those volume settings and try to find the settings for your system that give you the best music listening experience!

And be aware that sometimes less is more :)