Volume adjustment for albums?

[Markoesa]

What does it mean? I turned volume adjustment off in the settings of in the musicsystem audio settings.

I have a squeezebox classic and I am now using flac files. Previously I used itunes but I turned it off (deselecting the itunes check). My music is on an external harddrive. I made a shortcut to the specific map and placed that in the User/Music folder.

I want to turn off this album volume adjustment, how can I do that? I checked both squeezecenter and the classic, both specify that volume adjustment is not used. When I lookup an album in SC, it says volume adjustment -8,43 in the album section.

Thanks for the help.

[Moonbase]

What it shows is what is in your tags for the files, respectively (Replay Gain or Apple SoundCheck values).

What it uses is what you specify on a per-player basis:

• No adjustment
• Track-based (also called "Radio") adjustment
• Album-based (also called "Audiophile") adjustment
• "Smart" adjustment (use track-based values normally, album values if consecutive tracks from any one album are played)

The values inside the files are just values calculated by a complex algorithm to make things "sound equally loud", they only affect the music in the file if you choose to apply them in a player.

So you can have the best of it all :-)

[Markoesa]

What it shows is what is in your tags for the files, respectively (Replay Gain or Apple SoundCheck values).

What it uses is what you specify on a per-player basis:

• No adjustment
• Track-based (also called "Radio") adjustment
• Album-based (also called "Audiophile") adjustment
• "Smart" adjustment (use track-based values normally, album values if consecutive tracks from any one album are played)

The values inside the files are just values calculated by a complex algorithm to make things "sound equally loud", they only affect the music in the file if you choose to apply them in a player.

So you can have the best of it all :-)

Hey, great! Thanks for the reply.

[Lefatshe]

The values inside the files are just values calculated by a complex algorithm to make things "sound equally loud", they only affect the music in the file if you choose to apply them in a player.

How does Exact Audio Copy, or any other ripping program, "know" the dB level of an album or track to make the adjustment? Is there a tag on a CD? Or does EAC "hear" the track/album? ;-)

Thanks for the easy to follow summary of how to use replay gain.

[Moonbase]

Yes, programs calculating Replay Gain actually have to "hear" the music (that’s why it takes a while).

Here’s a good (though already a little outdated) page from the original Replay Gain author David Robinson:
http://replaygain.hydrogenaudio.org/

Be aware that the most often used reference loudness is now 89 dB SPL.

(EAC probably uses LAME to get the Replay Gain values for MP3 files [it can easily be done while encoding] but as far as I remember only calculates track ("Radio") Replay Gain values.)

[Nonreality]

Yes, programs calculating Replay Gain actually have to "hear" the music (that’s why it takes a while).

Here’s a good (though already a little outdated) page from the original Replay Gain author David Robinson:
http://replaygain.hydrogenaudio.org/

Be aware that the most often used reference loudness is now 89 dB SPL.

(EAC probably uses LAME to get the Replay Gain values for MP3 files [it can easily be done while encoding] but as far as I remember only calculates track ("Radio") Replay Gain values.)

Yes both EAC and dbpoweramp can only do track gain while ripping. I don't bother during the rip because I like to have both track and album. So I do it after the rip.

[verypsb]

Yes both EAC and dbpoweramp can only do track gain while ripping. I don't bother during the rip because I like to have both track and album. So I do it after the rip.

Wrong. dbpoweramp does calculate track and album replaygain while ripping...

[Peter314]

Yes both EAC and dbpoweramp can only do track gain while ripping. I don't bother during the rip because I like to have both track and album. So I do it after the rip.

I didn't realise that. I only recently started using dbpoweramp, and one of the attractions was being able to do away with the extra step of applying RG. Just to make sure I understand, having both boxes ticked does not result in album gain unless this is done separately after ripping?

[Lefatshe]

I found a lot of information, and many links, about "implementation of replay gain scanners" and "replay gain compliant audio players" on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_Gain

It is fascinating that scanners do a "psychoacoustic" analysis of each track (or album) and put the information in metadata.

dbpoweramp is not explicitly in the Wikipedia list of scanners that have replay gain ability. All the proponents of dbpoweramp on this forum might want to add it to the Wikipedia. I'm still using EAC, and it appears that with the command line I am adding replay gain adjustments using FLAC for both track and album.

I appreciate having replay gain information included as metadata with each track and album. I especially appreciate SqueezeCenter's features of letting me choose when to apply replay gain.

[Moonbase]

Just to make sure I understand, having both boxes ticked does not result in album gain unless this is done separately after ripping?

dBpoweramp can do both. Be aware that album gain can only be correct if dBpoweramp has all tracks that belong to an album (or a disc).

The calculated RG values for both track and album gain are stored as tags in your files, so if you don’t use the "apply gain DSP" it won’t change your audio data. And it will of course only work with players that understand the RG tags (like SqueezeCenter and SqueezeBoxen).

That is the preferred way of doing it — and it allows you later (at playback time) to select between no RG, track RG, album RG, or SC’s "smart" RG (which essentially uses track gain but automagically switches to album gain if it sees some more tracks from the same album being played).