volume levelling a compilation

[aubuti]

The only downside I see to adding RG tags to your classical albums is the extra processing time. You can always tell LMS to ignore or respect the RG tags.

One advantage I can see is if you play two classical albums back-to-back that have very different average volume levels. Then the RG tags would save you from adjusting the volume knob on your amp, provided your LMS settings were either Album gain or SmartGain.

[dasmueller]

i don't see any downside. Particularly if you use "smart gain" so when playing an entire album it uses album level gain (not track level, which would be bad). And of course, with one click you can turn OFF the use of RG tag info in SB webGUI so it doesn't get used at all. Can't hurt to have the tag info in my opinion.

Thanks gary. Now I will be curious to see how long it takes to process 24K FLAC files !

[garym]

Thanks gary. Now I will be curious to see how long it takes to process 24K FLAC files !

foobar2000 does this pretty fast I recall. But I'm sure it will be hours (overnight?)

[garym]

but again, be sure to add BOTH album and track RG values. It does it all in one pass anyway....

[emalvick]

The only thing I'll add goes back to the OP...

The Original Post stated that a compilation was be developed from random songs as opposed to a release compilation (like a soundtrack, tribute, etc).

It seems that in that case, the person would probably not want to have Album Gain tags at all. Album Gain is a meaningless concept if what you are listening to isn't a real album, and you'd still hear all the volumes mismatched if using it (assuming there are going to be mismatched volumes).

I believe removing the Album Gain tags forces the LMS to use the Track Gain values since they are the only thing present for such files (except perhaps the server is set to use Album Gains only... (?))

[JJZolx]

emalvick... You beat me to it.

I wonder if it would be better for these ad-hoc compilation albums if you only applied track gain, rather than also adding album gain. The tracks weren't mastered to be released together, so their loudness levels could easily be all over the place. Using SmartGain, where album gain is applied when playing tracks from the same album back-to-back, could result in some too high or low output levels, I would think. You might be better off only using track gain, which you'd accomplish by either not adding album gain or else by copying the track gain values to the album gain tags.

Stated differently, these ad-hoc albums are really just playlists in disguise. You'd never have album gain values applied when playing a playlist unless the adjacent tracks were actually from the same 'real' album release.

[dasmueller]

Thank you all for your thoughts. This is getting interesting ! That's one of the reasons I love these forums , so many people sharing their thoughts and ideas ! Although I do try to give some of my limited experience to others hopefully over time I will be more able to lend assistance. Wish more of the folks in the official forum would post here.

[dasmueller]

but again, be sure to add BOTH album and track RG values. It does it all in one pass anyway....

When I try to run a scan I get selections of

Scan per file -track gain
Scan Selection as a single album
Scan Selection As Albums
Remove ReplayGain information from files

I ran Scan Selection As Albums and did not see a method to do albums and tracks together. Holding the shift key and trying to select both did not work. When I ran a 2nd scan of tracks it only scans 100 of 24k files and 2/3 did not process w msg of unsupported format or corrupted file. Am I doing something wrong/have a bad install ?

Will look at some of the unsupported/corrupted files, but am missing most of the library w this scan ?

Tried one FLAC file reported as unsupported format or corrrupted file in Squeezeplay and it was fine

[garym]

When I try to run a scan I get selections of

Scan per file -track gain
Scan Selection as a single album
Scan Selection As Albums
Remove ReplayGain information from files

I ran Scan Selection As Albums and did not see a method to do albums and tracks together. Holding the shift key and trying to select both did not work. When I ran a 2nd scan of tracks it only scans 100 of 24k files and 2/3 did not process w msg of unsupported format or corrupted file. Am I doing something wrong/have a bad install ?

Will look at some of the unsupported/corrupted files, but am missing most of the library w this scan ?

Tried one FLAC file reported as unsupported format or corrrupted file in Squeezeplay and it was fine

we are talking about different things. Any of those scans would would add both AlBUM and TRACK RG tags. I'm not even sure that foobar lets you do anything other than add both ALBUM and TRACK RG.

The options you mention you should use "scan by album (tags)" This lets foobar know that an album is identified by tags. but don't forget our earler discussion of the options for telling foobar how to determine what an album is (i was suggesting %album% for compilations, %artist% %album% for others, but someone had a good idea about using %path% if all your albums are in separate subdirectories).

Open the files after scanning in mp3tag. Right click, choose extended tags, then you should actually see the fields for albums gain, track gain, and album peak, track peak.

[garym]

And for example, I'd use the "scan selection as single album" if I was simply adding a bunch of files to foobar2000, selecting them all, but maybe they aren't tagged as same album. with that option, foobar doesn't care about the tags at all, it just thinks, "I'll treat all these selected songs AS IF they are a single album, thus the ALBUM gain will be the same for all the tracks, but the individual track gains will of course all be different.