I would like to propose a small, optional feature that could meaningfully improve listening quality for users who care about musical dynamics — without changing audio playback or affecting the default experience.
Idea
Add an optional “Dynamic Range filter” that allows users to exclude tracks with extremely low internal dynamic range from recommendations and autoplay.
Important design principles:
The filter would be OFF by default.
It would only affect content selection (recommendations, radio, autoplay), not playback processing.
No compression or DSP would be applied.
The original audio would remain untouched.
A simple implementation could use an existing loudness-based metric such as EBU R128 Loudness Range (LRA), calculated offline per track.
Example user setting:
Enable Dynamic Range filter
Minimum dynamic range (LRA): slider
Apply only to selected genres (e.g. classical, jazz, acoustic, etc.)
Why this is valuable:
It allows listeners who prefer natural dynamics to avoid overly dense and heavily limited masters.
It avoids any artistic interference with the audio signal.
It introduces a quality-oriented selection criterion, similar in spirit to how loudness normalization removed the incentive for excessively loud mastering.
This would not be a “quality judgement” feature, but a personal listening preference tool — much like genre or mood filtering.
From a system perspective, it could also provide useful feedback to content producers, as excessively low-dynamic masters would be less likely to appear in certain listener profiles.
Thank you for considering this idea.
Best regards,
Tõnu Valk