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[widman99]

I am attempting to burn a compilation CD and have been messing around with replay gain.  When I try to use replay gain, the CD plays back at a very low volume level (tough to get loud enough in the car).  After listening to the compilation without replay gain I decided most of the songs are close enough in volume, however there is one song that is too low and another that is too loud.  Is there a way to punch up the quiet song and tone down the louder song without affecting the rest of the CD?

thanks,
pete

[JONCAT]

This is one problem with Replay Gain. Why can't it find a reasonable "middel point" and use that as the center for gain reduction on all tracks. It seems like Replay Gain does not boost gain, contrary to its namesake, but only reduces the loudest tracks to fit in with the tracks of lowest gain. Maybe you could burn a disc with RG enabled, then rip it and boost the gain in Wavelab ?

DC

[widman99]

Is there a way to manually edit the replay gain numbers?  I was hoping for a way to leave most of the songs alone (unanalyzed??), then bump the quiet song +2 dB and drop the loud song -2 dB.

pete

[Alex B]

By default MC uses an 83 dB reference value for replay gain. With modern compressed music that can lead to a relatively quiet overall volume level, but on the other hand with highly dynamic music like classical a higher value could produce some digital clipping. 83 dB is a good compromise. (It is the originally proposed replay gain standard, though some other programs use 89 dB instead.)

You could use MC's Disk Writer output mode for making adjusted temporal files for CD burning. It makes wave files to a specified folder instead of playing the tracks through the sound card. (Disk Writer has an option for breaking the output to individual track files. It is also very fast because the files are processed at the maximum speed.)

For example, you can increase the overall volume a bit by playing the tracks that are fine with a +6 dB fixed replay gain correction. Play the quiet track with a +8 dB correction and the loud track with a +4 dB correction separately. After that drop the new wave files into the burn dialog.

[widman99]

Thanks for the hint.  I ended up adding a fixed 8 - 10 dB increase on the quiet songs and ouput them with Disk Writer.  I substituted the resulting wave files in the original playlist and burned the CD without using Replay Gain.  This evened out the track-to-track variation pretty well. 

pete