Help / Playback & output
Volume, unity gain and vocal ducking
Vesari Stylus has one volume slider, and it sits at the very end of the app's own processing. That is why Bit-Perfect mode freezes it, with an At unity pill beside it. And if your level dips whenever a singer comes in, that is not the app doing it.
Where the volume control is
Look at the player bar along the bottom of every page. The transport controls sit in the middle, and the volume control is at their right-hand end: a speaker icon and a short slider. The output device readout and the queue button sit further right.
Drag it, click anywhere along it, or tab to it and nudge it with the arrow keys. It runs from silence at the left to full at the right. There is no numeric readout and no mute button, so for silence drag it to the left or pause.
What the slider actually does
It is the last stage of the app's processing chain. ReplayGain, the Equalizer, the Parametric EQ and Crossfeed are all applied first, in that order, and the volume setting scales whatever comes out of them. It is a plain multiply: at a quarter, every sample is a quarter of its original size.
Two things it is not: the Windows volume, and the dial on your DAC or amplifier. Both sit downstream of the app and are untouched by it.
Unity, and why the app makes a fuss about it
Unity is the top of the slider: a multiply by one, so samples leave the volume stage exactly as they arrived. Any lower setting alters every single sample.
That matters if you are chasing an untouched stream to your DAC. A chain that changes nothing is one of the conditions the engine weighs before the Bit-perfect row on the Devices page reads YES, and a setting below the top breaks it on its own, whatever else you have switched off. See Bit-Perfect mode: the bypass switch, and the badge it is not and The signal path & the bit-perfect badge.
When the slider goes inactive
Switch on Bit-Perfect mode and the engine holds the whole chain neutral and forces unity gain. The switch is in Settings, on the Playback tab under Audio Output, and again on the DSP Rack page in a panel headed Bit-perfect mode. Volume reaches the engine only through that chain, so the slider has nothing left to do: it is disabled and jumps to the top of its range. A small pill appears next to it saying one of two things.
- At unity on its own means the mode is on and the slider is pinned, and that is all it claims.
- At unity · Bit-Perfect means the same, and adds that the engine's report on the current or most recent stream came back positive.
Your stored level is not thrown away. Turn Bit-Perfect mode off and it comes back from the next track. The slider snapping to the top is deliberate rather than cosmetic: the engine really is playing at full gain while the mode is armed, and a slider frozen at your old level would hide that loudness jump instead of warning you about it.
Bit-Perfect mode is a Lifetime feature. On Free and Pro the switch cannot arm the engine, and the slider stays live.
Volume that dips during vocals
Vesari Stylus has no ducking feature. Nothing in it watches the audio and rides the level as you listen. ReplayGain is the only thing that changes level by itself, and it applies one fixed figure from the track's tags, evenly, for the whole track, so it cannot dip under a phrase and lift after it. See ReplayGain: what it does and how to use it.
So if the level drops when a singer starts and recovers afterwards, that is a Windows audio enhancement on your output device, usually Loudness Equalization or Voice Clarity. Settings → Playback → Audio Output carries a note headed Volume ducking during vocals saying the same thing.
To turn the enhancements off:
- Right-click the speaker icon in the Windows notification area and choose Sound settings.
- Open your output device.
- Open Additional device properties.
- On the Enhancements tab, tick Disable all enhancements. Some drivers label that tab differently.
The alternative is Output mode → WASAPI Exclusive, which bypasses the Windows mixer entirely, so its enhancements never reach the stream. It is a Lifetime feature, and it locks the device to Vesari Stylus while it plays. See Choosing an output mode: Shared, Exclusive & ASIO.
The level starts at full every time
Vesari Stylus does not carry your level between sessions: each launch begins at the top of the slider. Windows keeps its own per-app level in its volume mixer, a separate control that does persist, so if the app is quiet on every launch that is the place to look.
When it still does not add up
If there is no sound at all rather than a level problem, start with No sound. If pushing the volume up brings crackle or buzz with EQ boosts in play, that is a headroom question, covered in Boosting the EQ causes distortion.
If none of that fits, tell us: Settings → Support → Report a Bug, naming the output device, the output mode and roughly where the slider was. See Is this a bug? How to report it.