You should be able to omit the -Artist=[] part of the smartlist. If I'm reading it correctly, it's saying to exclude any audio file that has an empty Artist field. Not sure why that would be necessary when trying to identify audio files that haven't been analyzed.
But anyway, here's the simple answer to your first question.
Normalization sucks. It really has no use anymore, IMO, ever since Replay Gain was implemented. Normalization takes your audio files and makes them all the same volume, but it basically makes the entire track the same volume, so the louder parts of the song are the same volume as the quieter parts. The result is just a muddied mess.
Replay Gain, on the other hand, makes all of your songs play back at the same relative volume, but leaves quiet or louder parts of the song alone. So while all the songs you play will sound the same volume-wise, you still get a natural sounding song.
To use Replay Gain, there are actually two steps to take. The first is to analyze the files. MC uses the information it collects to determine what volume to play the songs back with. The smartlist you're asking about is only used to determine which files haven't been analyzed yet. But you can just select every audio file in your library and tell MC to analyze them. It'll skip songs that have already been analyzed. To tell it to analyze them, just select the files, right click and choose Library Tools->Analzye Audio (I think - I'm at a Mac right now so I might be off on the exact menu options to pick). A dialog box should open up listing all the files you've selected. Just click the Analyze button and then, if you've got a lot of files, go to bed or go spend some time with your family or something. This part takes a while.
Once the analysis is done, the only thing left to do is tell MC to actually use Replay Gain. You do that by going into the DSP studio (IIRC you do that by right clicking the EQ button up in the player area and choosing DSP Studio). in here, you should see on the left an option for Replay Gain. Check the box next to it to activate it, and then click on it to view its options. You can play around in here, but what I do (and since you said this is primarily for Radio mode use) is to choose Replay Gain (instead of Album Gain), tell it to set the volume based on the current playlist, and check the box that says something about enabling clip protection. Again, I know my descriptions suck, but that's because I'm on this stupid Mac.
Once those two steps are done, you should notice that your music all plays back at the same relative volume.
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Topic: Normalization vs Replay Gain (Read 5315 times)