This is so weird: seems like music on my iPhone will get to a certain volume and then won’t get any louder even though I can see that the volume slider isn’t maxed out. What on Earth is wrong?
There are a couple of reasons that some music might be louder or softer than other music on a track by track basis, but if you’re seeing this consistently across all your music, I suspect that either you have a volume limit set or you have noise limiting headphones or earbuds. Let’s assume that the latter isn’t the case (these are most often headphones marketed for children and definitely not what comes with your iPhone) and that somehow there’s a volume limitation set within iOS 8 on your phone.
The good news is that once you know where to look, it’s easy to find and fix.
But it’s not where you ‘d think, it’s not a setting in the Music app itself:
Where is it? Turns out you need to go to Settings and scroll down, down, down to find “Music”:
If you aren’t completely updated on your own phone, you might have a different icon for “Music”. Don’t let that throw you for a loop!
Tap on Music to continue and here are the surprising number of settings you’ll discover:
What you want to check is Volume Limit, so tap on that and you’ll see, it’s just a simple slider:
My guess is that yours is set to half-way down or similar. Not so good.
The easy solution: move the slider all the way to the right as I have done.
Fixed.
Now while you’re here, also look at the EQ settings to see how the “equalizer” is set.
I like “bass booster” but you might experiment with a few different options, because after all, if you’re going to listen to loud music, it might as well sound good, right?
Hope that clears up the mystery of your too-soft iPhone music!