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[Unyalli]

Hello, very interested in Replay Gain style Normalizing using "Automatic based on current playlist."

Been searching and reading for an hour now and can't figure out how to do this. I have 1.9 gig's of mp3 and wma files on a usb flash drive. How do I get them to all play as loud as possible without adding distortion and at the same human perceptable volume?

This is the holy grail of downloading music and seem's virtually impossible. What I've read in media center help leads me to believe this has finally been accomplished. Willing to buy this program if indeed it will do this.

Thanks

[Doof]

This is kind of a two-step process in MC.

The first step is to tell MC to analyze your audio files. You do this by selecting all of the music you want to analyze, then right click on them and choose Library Tools -> Analyze Audio...  When the box pops up, it should list all of the files you selected. Then just click the Analyze button. Depending on how many files you're working with, you may want to go grab a drink. Or dinner. Or watch a movie. Or maybe even go to bed for the night if you're analying thousands of files.

Once that's done, you need to go into the DSP Studio. You do that by going to the Player menu, choosing Playback Options, then DSP Studio... Once in there check the box that says "Volume Leveling". Then just set the options you prefer.

Under Mode you have two options. Track based and Album based. Track based will make all tracks the same volume, but if you're listening to a full album that has gapless tracks (like a live concert album) then you may get strange results due to the tracks all being at the same volume even though they shouldn't be. That's where Album based comes in. Using that setting, MC will make sure the entire album plays at the same relative volume, but each track may be quieter or louder than the others if that's the way it was made. If that makes any sense. I'm sure somebody else could explain it better. Fire up a live album using Track based mode and you'll pretty quickly see what I mean. I generally leave it on Track based with the intention of changing it to Album based if I'm going to be listening to an entire album. There have been requests in the past that MC automatically detect what you're listening to and adjust this mode accordingly, but I'm not sure if that was ever implemented. Anybody else know?

Next there's the Adjustment option. This is where you set the "Automatic based on current playlist" option that you mentioned. You can also set it for a fixed value or none at all, but I always just leave it on Automatic.

And last there's Overflow Handling. It's not really a Volume Leveling option as much as a general DSP setting, but since it's here you might as well set it. I think the default option is Clip protection, which seems to me like a good idea, but somebody more knowledgeable on the subject may have a different opinion.

So that's it in a nutshell. I think my post probably makes it sound more complicated than it is.

[Unyalli]

I have made it this far in the past. So here I am with a media center window where on the left I have selected my USB drive then on the right I clicked one file then did a Ctrl-A to select all files. Next I right click one of the selected files and nothing happens so I click the Tools menu then choose Library Tools -> Analyze Audio... After it's done analyzing and I have Replay Gain values etc... I go to Playback Options, DSP Studio... and select things as you state.

Well, here I am with three windows open. Now what. Do I just exit and it will prompt me to adjust all the files on my USB drive?

When it was doing it's analyzing how did it know to compute the value base on my DSP selection of levelize based on entire play list when I had not made that selection yet?

It's my understanding Media Center will "levelize" my flash drive so I can plug it into my car stereo's USB port and play the whole thing without having to adjust the volume knob.

Thanks Much

[Doof]

Once you've done the analysis and changed the settings in the DSP studio, you can close those two windows and just leave MC itself running. The analyze audio is the tool that collects the data for MC to use when it applies the DSP settings. It collects a bunch of information about your files, one of which is the "loudness" of the file in comparison to some baseline value. The DSP studio then uses that information to figure out how to adjust the volume for that track automatically.

Unfortunately this only really works when you're using MC. There are no permanent changes made to your files' volume levels, so if you copy a bunch of files to a flash drive and use it in your car stereo, then the volume leveling won't work. To do that, you need to permanently alter your files using another program called MP3Gain. I've never used it, but there are others around here who have.

Actually, from what I've just read, it looks like MP3Gain doesn't really do anything more than what MC's Analyze Audio does. The player itself still needs to be able to read in the Replay Gain information from the file and apply the adjustments at playback. I thought I remember MP3Gain doing it in such a way that it would then work on any player, but I guess it doesn't.

Looks like there is really no practical way of making them play with the same volume in your car unless your car supports Replay Gain data.

[Unyalli]

Um, we have a problem Houston.

The very first sentence in the Relay Gain Wiki http://wiki.jrmediacenter.com/index.php/Replay_Gain states....

Media Center can analyze your audio files so that you can play them back at the same volume. The information is stored in the database and in the file itself, so that playing the file with any player will play it back at the volume set here.

[Doof]

Well, that's what it says, but unless the player supports Replay Gain I don't see how it could possibly work. If the player doesn't support Replay Gain the data's going to be useless to it. Unless somebody knows something I don't.

[Alex B]

Unyalli,

The wiki info is inaccurate. MC saves the analysis info in the file tags (by default), but currently only JRiver's software products support the used format and can do playback correction.

If the file format is MP3 you can use the mentioned Mp3gain program for volume levelling the files on the flash drive.

You can also configure MC12 to handle the file transfer and keep a file cache on a local hard drive. MC can convert the internally supported file types to MP3 on the fly. It would probably be faster to run the MP3gain program on the cached files before the files are actually transferred.

If you have a lot of files you may want configure a HD folder as a handheld and let MC sync that folder instead of the flash drive. Then you can always copy a subset of the synched files to your flash drive.


Edit

I have 1.9 gig's of mp3 and wma files on a usb flash drive

I just noticed this. It is not possible to change the volume level of wma files without re-encoding, but if you are willing sacrify a tiny bit of the audio quality MC can convert unprotected wma files to mp3 on the fly.

[Doof]

Am I correct that even if you use MP3Gain, that whatever player you use for playback has to support Replay Gain for it do the volume leveling? Or will the files all play at the same volume no matter what player you use?

[Alex B]

Am I correct that even if you use MP3Gain, that whatever player you use for playback has to support Replay Gain for it do the volume leveling? Or will the files all play at the same volume no matter what player you use?

Mp3gain can change the volume level of each so called mp3 frame inside the file. It adjusts a numeric value that all mp3 decoders use on decoding. All HW and SW players use automatically the corrected volume level.

It has also an option to save the values only to an APE tag (without altering the MP3 code), but like JRiver's tag format only a few programs understand that format.

[Doof]

Ah, sweet. I thought that it was supposed to do that, but when I read up on it on SourceForge and wikipedia, it made it sound more like the way MC handles it.

What would be really sweet is if MC did it like this as well. It would be especially useful when burning mp3 cds or for handhelds. I think my mp3 cd burning routine just got a little more complicated. Now I'm going to have to start converting all of my APL files to MP3, then sending them to MP3Gain, then burning those to CD, rather than just telling MC to burn me a CD. Now that I have the drive space, I think I'll start looking at keeping a portable version of my library handy.