I have a question about doing the equivalent of MP3 Gain album analysis with APE files.
I’m in the process of burning my CDs (using EAC) and encoding them to MP3 files (using LAME a.p.s.) for my portable player and to APE files (using Monkey’s Audio) for my home stereo system. I store the APEs on an external HD and play them through my home system using MC. To prevent clipping and to prevent wild volume changes on the MP3s, I use MP3 Gain after I encode them. I use the album analysis function and apply the album gain since I want to keep the relative volume differences between songs on the same album intact.
On my APE files, however, it’s not that simple. I have used the Replay Gain function that comes loaded on MC. My understanding, though, is that this does a radio analysis of my tracks, which I understand to be the equivalent of track analysis in MP3 Gain. This equalizes the volume on my songs, but it destroys the relative differences within albums, boosting soft tracks to “too loud” a volume compared to loud tracks. My question is this: is there an equivalent of MP3 Gain’s album analysis that I can use on my APE files? Alternatively, is there anything I can do within MC to effect the equivalent of an album gain, as opposed to a radio gain, when using MC’s Replay Gain function?
Although I haven’t done it, I know that there are ways to do a Replay Gain album analysis directly on the WAV files for a particular CD before I encode them to APEs. I would rather not do this, however, because (a) it sounds like it would be yet another thing to learn how to do and would be a bit of a pain and (b) more importantly, as I understand it, that would alter the WAV files themselves, rendering them (and the APE files that would be created after encoding) no longer exact copies of what’s on the CDs, i.e., it would no longer be “lossless.”
Any suggestions? Thanks for any insight.