The City Council approved a revision to the city’s noise code yesterday, but neighborhoods with an overly spirited nightlife may not get any relief from a main source of noise complaints – revelers congregating on the street.

Recently, a group of as many as 300 Lower East Side and East Village residents met to complain that the area’s ever-growing number of bars and clubs and the traffic in and out of them was making it harder to live there.

Yesterday’s noise code revision,lauded by the Bloomberg administration, addressed noise emitted by bars and clubs, but not the spillover effect of people smoking,talking,or waiting outside.A spokesman for the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, Charles Sturcken, said yesterday that while the establishments themselves will be held to a tougher noise standard, the noise created by people on the street is not directly addressed in the new legislation.

“People-to-people issues are not addressed in this code,” he said. “If it is not disorderly conduct, and they are just talking, people have a right to talk on the street.”

Mr. Sturcken added that street noise usually falls under the jurisdiction of the Police Department. He said the police usually relate street noise complaints back to bar owners, who often make changes.

A lobbyist for the Nightlife Association, Robert Bookman, said yesterday that some places will “theoretically” have to turn down their music based on yesterday’s legislation. But he added that music is rarely the problem in the affected neighborhoods.

“They are complaining about street noise, not internal noise. If your patrons are talking loud on the street at night, that is not a noise code violation. That’s an issue that needs to be addressed on a policing level.”

In a last minute compromise that led to yesterday’s code revision, a more subjective method of ticketing bars and clubs was replaced with a less flexible technique. In the past, the city could hand out tickets to owners if music was “plainly audible” from about 15 feet outside bars, clubs, and restaurants. Now, police will use equipment that measures the level of bar noise, and tickets will be doled out if it exceeds a fixed decibel standard.

Mr. Bookman said the revision would protect business owners who were being harassed by police based on subjectivity, and he said the overall effect of the legislation would lessen noise complaints citywide. But he said that bar and club owners should not always bear full responsibility.

“Residential gentrification and encroachment has destroyed the traditional separation between nightlife, manufacturing uses, and residences,” Mr. Bookman said. “We haven’t moved into their areas, they moved into ours. Nightlife is the one that came in and pioneered these areas, and the residences welcomed it. It was only when the areas got expensive that the new residents complained.”