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[kiwi]

I am very interested in performating album by album normalization.  If I perform audio analysis on every file, and then play back the music, all the tracks are more or less normalized to the same volume level.  That's all well and good for pop music, or listening to randomized tracks, however, if you are listening to classical music, and randomizing by album, it causes a bit of weirdness, causing quieter tracks to have their volumes' raised w/ respect to the other track's in the album.

As I see it, the audio analysis is alread performed for you by MC.  All I need to do is take the gain value for the track that is normalized the least and apply it to all the other fields.  

I don't know the best way to manage this, however, it would seem that a plug-in could easily be written to read in tracks, find the min replay gain and set all other tracks in the album accordingly.  

Does anyone have any suggestions on where to start?

I assume that downloading the SDKs is a good place to start, but figured I'd see whether anyone had any pointers.

Thanks,
kiwi

[Doof]

Wouldn't it be easier to just turn Replay Gain off?

Because even if you did as you plan, when you tried to listen to any of those files with other files not in the same album, then replay gain won't work correctly.

The best solution to this problem is for MC to actually calculate an Album Gain value and use that when playing back full albums.

[kiwi]

Well, it would be easier to just turn replay gain off.  

Because even if you did as you plan, when you tried to listen to any of those files with other files not in the same album, then replay gain won't work correctly.

I think that it would still be beneficial to have replay gain that was adjusted by album, even if you were playing random tracks.

I guess that I feel that songs the artist wanted to have be soft/quiet should be soft/quiet while songs that are supposed to be loud should be loud.  By setting on value for each album you would accomplish this.  

In theory, with replay gain done this way, the loudest songs on every album would be normalized so that they played back at the same levels, and all other songs would play back at their appropriate level relative to your playback volume.

The best solution to this problem is for MC to actually calculate an Album Gain value and use that when playing back full albums.

Agreed.  Or to to use a calculated field for it.  They just need to take the value of the loudest track and apply it to the entire album.  Maybe having replay gain have a selectable input, i.e. by album or by track.

If I were to write a plug-in, I'd have it set the album gain for every track.  It would also copy the track gain to a second field. Then it would have an option for switching these values in the tags.

kiwi