ReplayGain

[simbun]

(15-04-2023 06:20)jes Wrote:  That is incorrect. MP3Gain does not modify the file, but adds the information as an APE tag incl. undo information. It is a nifty little program.

I've never used this program before, but I think you're wrong. Hydrogenaud.io has a good explanation of what it does. It does make sense to apply the changes directly to the audio as otherwise you'd need every player to support the tags, this way it "just works".

As a quick test, I chose a quiet song (from my FLAC collection), converted it to MP3, took a copy of it and ran one through MP3Gain. Removed all the tags from the "gained" song, and compared both in Audacity and one is much louder than the other.
I also split both MP3's into 20 second chunks, interleaved the tracks so they formed one coherent song and then indexed with MinimServer and the gain was obvious.

I used the default settings in MP3Gain if that makes a difference.