Foobaar vs MediaMonkey

[Zombie]

Been irritated for some time (many years, actually) that some replay gain tags in flac files are inaccurate. I have always used MediaMonkey to set the gain levels.
I installed Foobar of other reasons but tried to retag some very problematic tracks/albums and voila! Fixed. I decided to retag my entire library of 18 000 tracks and now the levels are spot on. Kudos to Foobar for this.

[MAAC]

I don't use Replaygain and so I clean them from my files. It never worked well for me.
I've found many MP3 audio files which show Gain values in Mediamonkey, but You can't clean them. Even if You reset them, they reappear.
Foobar does a good job of cleaning them with Fix VBR header or Rebuild Mp3 stream.
I've also found that those files have duplicate tags in the end of the file with MP3val.
I also opened them in Notepad and You can see the duplicate tags in the end of the file.
MP3val finds garbage at the end of the file.

[slartibartfast]

I don't use Replaygain and so I clean them from my files. It never worked well for me.
I've found many MP3 audio files which show Gain values in Mediamonkey, but You can't clean them. Even if You reset them, they reappear.
Foobar does a good job of cleaning them with Fix VBR header or Rebuild Mp3 stream.
I've also found that those files have duplicate tags in the end of the file with MP3val.
I also opened them in Notepad and You can see the duplicate tags in the end of the file.
MP3val finds garbage at the end of the file.

If you don't like replaygain you can just turn it off in settings, no need to remove the tags. In what way did it not work well for you. I can see that it wouldn't work well if some tracks have replaygain tags and others don't but it works well for me.

Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

[kidstypike]

If you don't like replaygain you can just turn it off in settings, no need to remove the tags. In what way did it not work well for you. I can see that it wouldn't work well if some tracks have replaygain tags and others don't but it works well for me.

Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

Totally agree. As 99% of my listening is random tracks, I couldn't do without "Smart Gain". No replay gain tags is just pants.

[Redrum]

@slarti, @ktp,

Can you elaborate a bit? I haven't used an gain settings, nor have I added any gain tags to my library. It's on my "things I need to do list"...for years. . I could use some perspective/advice.

I'd like to get to it this winter. I listen to internet radio maybe 70% of the time, but when listening to my library it's almost always album start to finish. My biggest gain complaints is the volume differences switching between albums. Also, the gain difference between some internet radio stations with each other, and with my library, but I realize I might not be able to do anything about that.

I also have used media monkey for years and found allot of it clunky, but it does the job, and batch convert FLAC ->mp3 for a thumb drive for my vehicles works great.

Jim

[d6jg]

@slarti, @ktp,

Can you elaborate a bit? I haven't used an gain settings, nor have I added any gain tags to my library. It's on my "things I need to do list"...for years. . I could use some perspective/advice.

I'd like to get to it this winter. I listen to internet radio maybe 70% of the time, but when listening to my library it's almost always album start to finish. My biggest gain complaints is the volume differences switching between albums. Also, the gain difference between some internet radio stations with each other, and with my library, but I realize I might not be able to do anything about that.

I also have used media monkey for years and found allot of it clunky, but it does the job, and batch convert FLAC ->mp3 for a thumb drive for my vehicles works great.

Jim

I bit the bullet a few years back and applied replaygain to all my files. So glad I did as it makes a massive difference when not listening in album mode. Smart gain is truly brilliant.

I applied the tags using Foobar2000 in 3 or 4 chunks. I already had a full backup but would have taken one first if not. I also made sure my daily backup didn’t run while I was running the Foobar2000 process.

[MAAC]

In what way did it not work well for you.

I did apply replaygain one time ago to several tracks for test and couldn't notice a difference, but I presume it also depends on the player.

[garym]

I did apply replaygain one time ago to several tracks for test and couldn't notice a difference, but I presume it also depends on the player.

Yes, your player has to be capable of using RG tags. LMS and Squeezebox players are capable.

[bossanova808]

Could not deal with life without Replaygain. It's definitely not perfect and some tracks can seem to fool the process, but overall it makes a large library of tracks way, way more homogeneous in general volume levels.

That said, Replaygain is really many things, in practise - there's the old, traditional RG, and there's newer methods/implementations. So that might be part of your issue. I believe many tools are now using R128 rather than former implementations....and obviously, mixing methods of RG, which will be processing things differently and aiming for different levels, is going to cause issues.

So probably some testing as to which method you find best, and then using one consistent tool to process your entire library is the way to go.

(Personally I use a beets in a docker for all music processing of incoming things, and that uses gstreamer which uses traditional RG I believe).

[garym]

Could not deal with life without Replaygain. It's definitely not perfect and some tracks can seem to fool the process, but overall it makes a large library of tracks way, way more homogeneous in general volume levels.

That said, Replaygain is really many things, in practise - there's the old, traditional RG, and there's newer methods/implementations. So that might be part of your issue. I believe many tools are now using R128 rather than former implementations....and obviously, mixing methods of RG, which will be processing things differently and aiming for different levels, is going to cause issues.

So probably some testing as to which method you find best, and then using one consistent tool to process your entire library is the way to go.

(Personally I use a beets in a docker for all music processing of incoming things, and that uses gstreamer which uses traditional RG I believe).

I have used R128, with -18 setting for a few years. This matches the target volume of the older RG algorithm. Accordingly, I didn't have to go back and redo the many thousands of files I added RG to prior to the R128 method. foobar2000 uses the -18 setting by default. dbpoweramp allows the user to set this.