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[Trial]

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.

[xen-uno]

Album gain has not been implemented in MC yet...AFAIK.

WavGain is very easy to use (there is a front end for it)...if you save the log files (or at least keep record of gain applied) then you can roll back***. If you dither, though, then you can't roll back completely (since dither is low level random noise).

***pretty sure on this...with MP3Gain data RG you can because it adjusts the scale factor of each frame...but there are no frames in wav's...OK...now I'm not so sure.

10^-27

[nivw]

so I understand that should check out wavegain. ok
May I ask if OGG tags are differnt from ID3V2 that mp3 use.
If so what tags does MC uses for OGG?

Niv

[xen-uno]

Ogg & Flac use Vorbis Comments...far superior (well...that's an exaggeration) to ID3vx.x

Tag format for all intents in purposes is transparent to the user.

10^-27

[paulr]

If I am understanding the way ReplayGain works, is that it stores data as a tag which then instructs the software (MC10, Winamp, etc.) to adjust the volume.  This is as opposed to permanently changing the data in the compressed file (bad).

I think this would be a fantastic idea if especially if you could turn it on and off at will.  I'd love to be able to udjust gain across albums for playback, but know that my APE files were still bit perfect!

[Trial]

Thanks for the replies.  I now understand that MJ/MC does not have the ability to do Replaygain album analysis, only Replaygain track analysis.  (That, by the way, would be a GREAT feature to add.  Any possibility?)  As a result, I have experimented with using another player (foobar2000) to calculate what the album analysis adjustment should be.  I load my APE files from a particular album into this other player and run an album gain analysis on them.  My intention was that, once I had that figure (which, of course, is the same for all tracks on the album), I would reload the APEs back into MC and manually input that figure in the place where MC wants to automatically calculate the track analysis figure.

But I can't figure out how to do that.  When I reload the APEs that I have done a Replaygain album analysis on in the other player, MC shows that they haven't been replaygained at all.  It shows the "?" in the track analysis field.  And it won't let me manually input a figure there -- which, in my case, would be the album gain figure that I calculated using the other player.  So, is there a way to manually input the Replay track analysis entry that MC now does automatically when I hit "Analyze?"  If not, does anyone know of a tag editor that would allow me to adjust that figure?

I am really hoping for a way to achieve Replaygain album analysis in MC.  Thanks for any help.