Is it possible to "equalize" sound volume on my pc?

[Aleksej89]

I have an average (rather old) gaming pc that has a motherboard with a built in sound card (so it is not a dedicated one).

When watching youtube videos i always get a bit annoying when people either suddenly yell or start whispering since i have to constantly increase or decrease volume to make it actually enjoyable.

Is there some form of software (either in windows or some 3rd party application) that can make all the sound coming from my speakers be at a set volume ("loudness") so that, regardless of videos being loud/quiet, i always get the same volume (some kind of an automatic volume increase/decreaser or something?)?

My motherboard: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P5QL (LGA775)

Thanks for reading and helping out

[fixx]

Smarter music players support ReplayGain which does volume balancing for music but it also requires the ripped music to have the correct volume information embedded into the files. There's nothing similar for video.

What you're experiencing is the side effects of "Loudness War". It sucks and there's nothing that can be done about it. Balancing volume in realtime without significant negative side-effects to sound quality is not possible.

[Twoddle]

It's called volume normalization and many players support it including Classic media player.

It's perfectly possible to normalize volume realtime without sound quality loss, I don't know what the above poster is on about.

[fixx]

It's perfectly possible to normalize volume realtime without sound quality loss, I don't know what the above poster is on about.

Background hiss from lossy compression becomes unbearable once automatic "normalization" boosts it by 30db. Also the up and down "pumping" of volume can get really annoying. And it will not fix youtube or overall PC volume which is what the OP asked for.

That's what I'm on about.

[tielknight]

You could always drop ~$30 on a soundcard and use it's software to try and balance the volume. The Asus suite that i'm using with my Xonar DG does the job fairly well and I can usually hear quiet bits(like when people start whispering in movies) better than I could before. That and the audio mixer helps as well.

[Aleksej89]

So, in order to get a "system wide" sound normalization effect, i would probably need to get a dedicated sound card that has such a software function?

Well they are not expensive, i just gotta make sure it actually supports the sound normalization function.

Thank you all