5.1 AAC came out very quiet

Howdy yall. I extracted the 5.1 lpcm track from a blu-ray, as a 5.1wav, and fed it into NeroAacEncoder via MeGui to create a 5.1 AAC. I tried turning off the volume normalization but whatever I did, the resultant AAC file came out considerably quieter than the source. I ran the file through AACGain, it said it was already at 89db. I encoded the same WAV to a stereo AAC, ran that through AACGain and it was way louder. So I guess my question is fairly obvious... Also thou, I may (obviously) be mistaken but I always thought that the free NeroAacEncoder would only do stereo... I never even thought to try doing 5.1 until I saw in the options audio configuration options of MeGui that it seemed to think it could and then did, albeit, somewhat quietly. This is not a priority request or anything, I have already started using 5.1flac instead.

For one, are you using 5.1 speakers to listen to this track? Or headphones / 2.1 speakers, etc.? If you are using the latter, then when you listen do a 5.1 track and you do not downmix to your headphones (via ffdshow for instance) your perceived listening experience will be much quieter. Try enabling the mixer in ffdshow, and set it for a headphone output. NeroAAC has always supported multichannel encoding.

yes, i have 5.1 speakers. I play it through Media Player Classic, using its inbuilt aac decoder, and i have unchecked the box to downmix it to stereo. The file plays fine, it has all the right sounds coming through all the 6 speakers. Its just quiet.

How are you passing it to MeGUI? Are you just pointing the file open box to the file itself, or are you passing it a script?

NeroAacEnc output have always the same volume than input. These problems are because players/decoders differences

i had the same problem if your using media player classic try this