Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mantara]

Hi Everybody  

can somebody tell me, if it possible to write ReplayGain values to the Metadata (ID3V2 tags for MP3)?
I had analyzed my mp3-files with MC, but if I sent them to the player (Sansa Fuze support ReplayGain), the ReplayGain values are not shown. If I use another program, everthing is fine with ReplayGain
Thx...

[yonkiman]

can somebody tell me, if it possible to write ReplayGain values to the Metadata (ID3V2 tags for MP3)?  I had analyzed my mp3-files with MC, but if I sent them to the player (Sansa Fuze support ReplayGain), the ReplayGain values are not shown. If I use another program, everthing is fine with ReplayGain

As you can tell from the overwhelming lack of response to your question from almost a year ago, the answer is no:  MC does not support ReplayGain tags in what has become the defacto standard.

As a loyal, paying MC user for ~10 years, I've expected J River to address this since MC 10 or so.  I engaged the topic on this forum every year or two.  But they appear to just not be interested - their proprietary MC replaygain implementation works for MC (and it does work well inside MC), so the developers appear to be satisfied, even though it doesn't work with my iPod RockBox, your Sansa Fuze, or (as far as I can tell) ANY PORTABLE MEDIA PLAYER on the planet.  Which seems like a pretty serious defect, but I don't see many people besides you and a few others complaining about it on the forum, so maybe we're the oddballs.  I think most people would LOVE this feature if they understood what it did and knew how to use it....but I guess most people don't.

In any case, I'm done waiting/hoping.  I'm using MC less and less, basically just for tagging now - I still think it's great for organizing my music library.  But I'm using a mix of other software to do my replaygain scanning and format conversion (which ironically is exactly what I was doing before I discovered MJ/MC10). 

By the way, there is a second way MC fails with replay gain,  If (like me) your collection is FLAC on your PC but you want to convert it to OGG for your mediaplayer, MC has this great feature that will automatically convert your files from FLAC to OGG on the fly while you sync.  Unfortunately, even if you've used something like foobar2000 to generate proper replaygain tags in your PC's flac collection, MC thoughtfully strips them (or otherwise puts them in an unreadable format) when it auto converts to OGG.

If they'd just fix THAT I'd be happy.  But I think they think they're done with audio and are spending all their time on video/online features now.  Makes me sad - what I always used to like about J River was that the developers seemed to "get it" and were always happy to add-in or fix common-sense things.   After 7 years or so of fighting for this, I don't think it's going to happen.

[JimH]

Yonkiman,
Are you using MC15 latest build?  15.0.130 is available on the MC15 board.

Your comment about our focus isn't accurate.  We've spent a lot of time on audio.

I believe our tagging is up to date.  If you have a problem, please report it in the thread that announces the build.

[gappie]

But I think they think they're done with audio and are spending all their time on video/online features now. 

i can understand that sometimes it might feel that way, but you can not say that about 15. with kernel streaming, 64 bit dsp, roomcorrection and much more, all audio features.

 
gab

[yonkiman]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for the response.

Are you using MC15 latest build?  15.0.130 is available on the MC15 board.

Honestly, I haven't been keeping up.  I downloaded it last night.  For some reason it didn't import my MC14 database, and decided everything library-related was "read only" or something, so it can't/won't save library changes.  I'll try to figure that out.

Your comment about our focus isn't accurate.  We've spent a lot of time on audio.

Sorry if I sounded inflammatory.  Replaygain is the biggest/only audio feature I care about that MC doesn't adequately support, and I've been asking for it and working off & on with some of your developers on it since May 08, 2006 (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=33706.0), with no results.  (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=38695.0 and a long email exchange in September 2009 with Robert Brose that seemed to be making progress but sorta faded out)

I believe our tagging is up to date.  If you have a problem, please report it in the thread that announces the build.

I tried a quick experiment last night.  My initial results:

Good news:
When MC15 auto-converted my FLACs (that had been properly replaygain-tagged by soundKonverter in Linux) to OGG, replay gain seemed to work correctly on the OGG files when I listened to it on my ipod.  So it looks like MC15 just transferred the replay gain tags to flac (as one would hope).  This is better than the last time I tried (1 year ago, so MC14?), where the tags seem to be stripped or converted to a format/"container" that rockbox couldn't recognize.   So that's very good progress - now I can use an external replaygain tagger on my flac library, but I won't have to rescan the same songs after they're converted to ogg to go on my rockbox.  Progress!  Thanks!

Bad news:
I then took the same flac songs, stripped their tags in MC15, ran "Analyze Audio", and had MC15 convert them to ogg during another rockbox sync.  These ones did not replaygain correctly in my rockbox.  My first guess is that MC15 still just uses one "dB" value per track (presumably calculating album gain on-the fly as needed).  That may work fine for MC, but the rest of the world still needs an "album gain" and a "track gain" value for each track.

I might have made a mistake somewhere, but that's what I believe is real, after an hour or so of messing around.

It sounds like you're genuinely interested in working on this, so I'd be happy to do more work to help.  The first thing that would really help me would be if you could point me to a utility that shows all the tags in a file, and what sort of container (ogg) and/or type (ID3v1, ID3v2, etc.) they are in (I'm not an expert on all these tag nuances).  If I recall from my conversation with Robert last year, part of the problem was the correct info being in the wrong container/format.  I'd love to be able to see all this data directly, rather than have to do experiments that end up with broad results like "if I do A, B, and C, replay gain works on the rockbox".

Thanks,
Fred

[yonkiman]

i can understand that sometimes it might feel that way, but you can not say that about 15. with kernel streaming, 64 bit dsp, roomcorrection and much more, all audio features.

Well, gab, all it took was one look at your Richard Thompson-heavy now playing list and I was convinced - you clearly DO still care about music!  :-)

[yonkiman]

This is as far as I got last year (it has some useful tag information).  I don't know if it was followed-up on or not. 

-----

from: Fred Hamilton
to   Robert Brose
date   Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 10:01 PM
subject   Re: Fwd: Topic reply: Device information cannot be retrieved. Please reboot your PC and retry.u

Hi Bob,

I just wanted to follow up on our conversation from a few months ago.  We were talking about ReplayGain, and you mentioned that you thought you had it fixed with MC14.  I finally got a chance to check it out, and there's good news and bad news:

The good news is that when MC14 autoconverts formats while syncing to a portable device, it does now transfer the replaygain information to the converted file.  That's an improvement - I don't think MC13 did that.  So replaygain will work fine on the converted files if I play them in MC.

The bad news is that MC still does not use the "standard" replaygain tags, so no media player or portable device EXCEPT JRiver's can recognize or use it. 

MC's tag seems to be "MEDIAJUKEBOX:REPLAY GAIN".

"Standard" tags that the rest of the world (at least VLC media player, Foobar2000, and RockBox) expects are: 
  REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN
  REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK
  REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_GAIN
  REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_PEAK

I've verified that replaygain doesn't work on rockbox or foobar2000 with MC14-converted files, but vorbis-gained files work fine. I've attached images of the "smoking gun" - let me know if you'd like me to send the actual songs as well.

I've been pleading (and optimistically paying for upgrades) to get this implemented in MC for 2 or 3 years.  It seems so trivial - I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet!  JRiver seems to think that all that matters is that replaygain work on their closed MC system.  That's not an attitude I expect from you guys - you're so great in every other way.

So I wonder...is there any chance I will see this in my lifetime?  If all you did was add the 4 "standard" tags (you obviously want also keep the custom MC tags for backwards compatibility) I'd be delighted. 

Thanks again,
Fred

[Matt]

Bad news:
I then took the same flac songs, stripped their tags in MC15, ran "Analyze Audio", and had MC15 convert them to ogg during another rockbox sync.  These ones did not replaygain correctly in my rockbox.  My first guess is that MC15 still just uses one "dB" value per track (presumably calculating album gain on-the fly as needed).  That may work fine for MC, but the rest of the world still needs an "album gain" and a "track gain" value for each track.

On conversion for a handheld upload, the track gain of the original file is written to the tag of the new file.  I just confirmed that APE to OGG conversion resulted in an OGG file with a proper track gain tag.

However, Media Center does not write album gain values to the file tag of any format.  You will have to use track gain on the device.