Every podcast is different, with various levels of quality. Every podcast has different equipment within their means, they are sometimes recorded in person, or remote, and all of these various levels so of production quality mean that some podcasts sound quiet, while others do not.
I have a server where all my podcasts are downloaded and served to me, so I figure there must be a way to normalize all the incoming podcasts to make them a similar volume before I even listen to them. I'm just not sure how I would do that, precisely. I know it can be done, but if someone has solved this before, or knows of a solution they've tried and liked, I'm curious to hear about it.
They should really enable on-the-fly compression and normalization for every podcast in the player itself. Some podcasts are horrible to listen to not just because they are too quiet but because they are quiet 99% of the time and then way louder 1% of thr time.
ffmpeg can do all of this via various incantations but I don't know how much effort you want to put into your pipeline.
The tools to do it are buried in the ffmpeg incantation here: https://wiki.tonytascioglu.com/scripts/ffmpeg/dynamic_range_compression_dynaudnorm_compand
Interesting, I use audio book shelf, I wonder if I could modify it to use these settings.
That would be cool! If you find a way please let me know!