I want relatively louder tracks to continue to be relatively louder tracks regardless of what comes before or after them.
Track dynamics
are preserved for each album.
If you play the full album, the value MC calculates should be equal to the fixed-level Album Gain value.
My point was that if you change the track dynamics, by only selecting
part of an album, such as all the loud tracks for example, the album level is dynamically adjusted in MC for that playlist, rather than it being a static value which is no longer accurate for that selection.
All tracks in that selection are still treated as an "album" with one volume adjustment applied across all tracks, the difference is that this value is now based on the tracks which are actually included in the playlist.
So when compared against
other albums, they will be closer in volume than if you used a fixed value that was calculated from the entire album.
Say that you have an album with four tracks:
- Track 1: -13dB
- Track 2: -33dB
- Track 3: -13dB
- Track 4: -33dB
The average for this album is -23dB, which is exactly our leveling target, so the leveling correction would be 0dB if the album is played in its entirety, or if we used the old ReplayGain fixed-level correction.
In Media Center, if you play play Tracks 1 & 3 together, without Tracks 2 & 4, the correction will be -10dB, since the average level is -13dB, and -10dB brings that average level to our target of -23dB.
If you play tracks 1, 2, and 3 together, the correction will be -3.33dB, since the average of that selection is -19.67dB.
This value will be applied to all tracks in an album equally so that the difference in level between each of them is preserved, but the average level of that collection of tracks is closer to our target level of -23dB than a fixed correction of 0dB.
If the tracks are played separately in a mixed playlist, rather than grouped together, then individual track-based leveling will be used instead.
That's cool, and I'm not saying MC shouldn't have it - I might even use it, but it's not what I'm looking for. And more importantly, and I can not emphasize this enough, my media player doesn't support it. So it might be great if all everyone used was MC, but why can't we also be compatible with my Rockbox and all the other perfectly good hardware out there that supports the original implementation of ReplayGain?
Yes, even if it's only applied during handheld conversion, it would be nice if MC wrote a static Album Gain value. (assuming it does not currently - I don't have any portable devices configured through MC)