Replay Gain in next nightly/firmware 22

[vidurapparao]

Latest svn and the next nightly build (along with Squeezebox2 firmware
22) implements volume normalization/Replay Gain for various audio and
tag formats - ogg, FLAC, MP3Gain (APETAGEX), AACGain, RVAD (MP3 via
iTunes) and RVA2.

There is now a Replay Gain setting under the Player Settings > Audio
section of the web interface. This setting can take the following values:
1) Disable Replay Gain
2) Use Track Gain (if present) - uses only track gain information.
3) Use Album Gain (if present) - uses only album gain information.
4) "Smart" gain selection - uses ideas and code from James Sutula's
Dynamic Transition Updater/Smart Gain plugin to dynamically choose
between track and album gain. The idea is that album gain is used if
successive tracks are from the same album and in track order, track gain
is used otherwise.

The last is the default value of the setting. Please give this a try,
post feedback and file bugs if you see any. I'm open to alternate ideas
for the setting choices and default.

Thanks to Dan Sully for tag parsing/database work and James Sutula for
his plugin.

--Vidur

[JJZolx]

Latest svn and the next nightly build (along with Squeezebox2 firmware
22) implements volume normalization/Replay Gain for various audio and
tag formats - ogg, FLAC, MP3Gain (APETAGEX), AACGain, RVAD (MP3 via
iTunes) and RVA2.

There is now a Replay Gain setting under the Player Settings > Audio
section of the web interface. This setting can take the following values:
1) Disable Replay Gain
2) Use Track Gain (if present) - uses only track gain information.
3) Use Album Gain (if present) - uses only album gain information.
4) "Smart" gain selection - uses ideas and code from James Sutula's
Dynamic Transition Updater/Smart Gain plugin to dynamically choose
between track and album gain. The idea is that album gain is used if
successive tracks are from the same album and in track order, track gain
is used otherwise.

The last is the default value of the setting. Please give this a try,
post feedback and file bugs if you see any. I'm open to alternate ideas
for the setting choices and default.

Thanks to Dan Sully for tag parsing/database work and James Sutula for
his plugin.

--Vidur

Fantastic. I'm not sure if Replay Gain has an enormous amount of appeal for the typical dyed-in-the-wool audiophile, although it's a godsend for casual listening.

I love the Smart Gain idea, but I'm not so sure I agree with requiring track order. If you queue up an album, then you delete a track (you know, that one track that always ruins the album-listening experience :-) will Smart Gain revert to Track Gain? I don't think it should. I'd prefer logic along the lines of "if three or more tracks in a row are from the same album, then use Album Gain, otherwise use Track Gain".

[Bruce Hartley]

What's the recommended software (windows) for applying replaygain tags to MP3s and to FLACs?

Foobar or something else?

Thanks,
Bruce.

[Robin Bowes]

Bruce Hartley wrote:
> What's the recommended software (windows) for applying replaygain tags
> to MP3s and to FLACs?

I wrote a perl script to apply replaygain to my library of flac files.

I can tidy it up and release it if there's any interest.

R.
--
http://robinbowes.com

If a man speaks in a forest,
and his wife's not there,
is he still wrong?

[max.spicer]

This doesn't quite sound like it will do what I want. I would want ReplayGain enabled if I'm playing random tracks, and off otherwise. Am I right in thinking that smart mode would end up turning replay gain on permanently?

Max

Latest svn and the next nightly build (along with Squeezebox2 firmware
22) implements volume normalization/Replay Gain for various audio and
tag formats - ogg, FLAC, MP3Gain (APETAGEX), AACGain, RVAD (MP3 via
iTunes) and RVA2.

There is now a Replay Gain setting under the Player Settings > Audio
section of the web interface. This setting can take the following values:
1) Disable Replay Gain
2) Use Track Gain (if present) - uses only track gain information.
3) Use Album Gain (if present) - uses only album gain information.
4) "Smart" gain selection - uses ideas and code from James Sutula's
Dynamic Transition Updater/Smart Gain plugin to dynamically choose
between track and album gain. The idea is that album gain is used if
successive tracks are from the same album and in track order, track gain
is used otherwise.

The last is the default value of the setting. Please give this a try,
post feedback and file bugs if you see any. I'm open to alternate ideas
for the setting choices and default.

Thanks to Dan Sully for tag parsing/database work and James Sutula for
his plugin.

--Vidur

[jth]

Max - what's wrong with using album gain when listening to full albums?

[topster]

Max - what's wrong with using album gain when listening to full albums?

Since replaygain is done digitally, to reduce the volume of the music, it needs to truncate bits.

If this truncation is done after it's been bit-extended to 24 bits, then it might not result in any information loss, if not, then you'd lose info -- a big no-no for audiophiles.

Can someone confirm which is the case?

And if it does the 'right' thing, maybe someone else with more expertise can calculate what's maximum attenuation in dB the extra 8 bits buy us without data loss.

Thanks!

[pfarrell]

On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 11:07 -0700, topster wrote:
> And if it does the 'right' thing, maybe someone else with more
> expertise can calculate what's maximum attenuation in dB the extra 8
> bits buy us without data loss.

8 bits is 48 dB.
Each bit is 6 dB, times 8 gives 48.

Now 6 is just an approximation, the real value is 6.020599913
but that is close enough to six for us friends.

Humans have a hard time noticing a sound that is 70 dB below
another, most recording engineers consider -70 dB to be a total
cut. This is how most perceptual lossy compression for audio works.


for more, see
http://www.pfarrell.com/prc/bits.html


--
Pat
http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimse...msoftware.html

[PhilNYC]

Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but...what does replay gain do?

[fuzzyT]

PhilNYC wrote:
> Forgive me if this is a dumb question, but...what does replay gain do?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_Gain>

--rt