ReplayGain

[Pepsican]

(10-06-2016 20:49)simoncn Wrote:  My experience with track gain and album gain is different from your reasoning. I applied the dBpoweramp DSP effect to one of my albums to see what values would be produced. The album gain value (applied to all tracks) was -0.53 dB and the track gain values varied from +23.97 dB to -3.8 dB. These large differences in track gain values are because some tracks contain louder music and some tracks contain quieter music. It would not make sense (at least to me) to play this album with the loud tracks made quieter and the quiet tracks made louder.

I guess whether you'd use album gain for levelling or track gain, depends very much on your purpose. For listening to albums I would, like you, apply album gain. You'd want to preserve the output level differences because they probably are as the artist intended. But when building random playlists, that idea is no longer valid. Applying album gain in such a case could still leave you having to dial up or down the volume, especially when your selection of tracks is a bit eclectic and varies from 1980s releases to those of the current century.

(10-06-2016 20:49)simoncn Wrote:  I think the only time that the track gain value would be useful is when listening to a file that isn't part of an album. In this case, the file wouldn't have an album gain value and the only value that can be used is the track gain.

And in my view that case occurs when I start building playlists of various artists from CDs of various recording qualities. Something I personally do a lot. Think of playlists for parties or fitness. Arguably, today's listener no longer thinks in terms of albums. Mostly the music industry still does. But with iTunes and other download sites offering downloads by track, the idea of the album left us some time ago. But that last point is probably worthy of its own thread and best discussed over a beer and a meal.

Your points did make me think things through again though. I did a search on ReplayGain and there is not a site on audio where there is not a thread discussing whether album gain is better or not than track gain. So, it is safe to say that the general audience is divided and what one favours depends on how one listens to music.

That said, I guess (without understanding the structure and architecture of your software properly) that if a ReplayGain implementation makes it to MinimServer / MinimStreamer, a property to set which of the two you want to use is probably one of the less problematic things to programme compared to the rest (0 = off, 1 = trackgain, 2= album gain).

For now, thank you for your time and I'll just conclude you're contemplating some ideas and I'll sit back, hope, and see what happens.