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[zenpmd]

Would be very helpful

[mark_h]

It's already there...

Library Tools->Analyze Audio

Gives R128 and TT-DR results in fields:

Dynamic Range (R128)
Dynamic Range (DR)

[zenpmd]

Thanks man, awesome, I didnt know this existed. Is there a way to export your entire library details like that? I want to identify all my low DR recordings without doing it manually!

[mark_h]

Yup, just File->Export Playlist and choose your format.

Just make sure you're viewing your entire library and you'll get all the data you want, or you can create views that contain only specific data and just export that instead.

Or you could indeed create a "DR View" inside MC and sort it to show high DR etc.

Note that the numbers are Track DR values.  If you want Album DR you either need to do some external processing, eg inside a spreadsheet or learn how to use MC's global variables, after which you can get MC to calculate an Album average for you.

[zenpmd]

Added it as a field. Amazing! Thank you so so much, this is really really useful.

How accurate is it?

[kstuart]

Just as long as you aware that "low DR" does not equal "bad sound quality" and "high DR" does not equal "good sound quality".

[zenpmd]

Just as long as you aware that "low DR" does not equal "bad sound quality" and "high DR" does not equal "good sound quality".

Appreciate any education in this area, but my understanding is that DR is how quiet and how loud a track goes, and therefore subjectively the music itself will seem more "dynamic" and "powerful" and its effective volume changes

[ferday]

Added it as a field. Amazing! Thank you so so much, this is really really useful.

How accurate is it?

It's standardized so it's as accurate as any other software based DR calculation

Note that it's only per track...you can get average album DR with expressions

[mwillems]

Appreciate any education in this area, but my understanding is that DR is how quiet and how loud a track goes, and therefore subjectively the music itself will seem more "dynamic" and "powerful" and its effective volume changes

Conventional DR (TT-DR) measures the difference between the average loudness of the track and the loudest part of the track.  A very low number will suggest that significant dynamic range compression has been applied, which means a track is likely to sound less dynamic than a version of the same track with a higher DR.  It's primarily useful when comparing different versions of the same track, not particularly useful when comparing different tracks.  And even then it's certainly not the be all end all. 

There's a long discussion of DR vs. R128 DR and what it all means on the wiki : http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Dynamic_Range

(full disclosure, I wrote most of it).

[kstuart]

Appreciate any education in this area, but my understanding is that DR is how quiet and how loud a track goes, and therefore subjectively the music itself will seem more "dynamic" and "powerful" and its effective volume changes

Two factors:

1 - Is that artists (the combination of musicians and producers) often use compression intentionally as a musical effect.   Many rock songs were mixed to sound good on radio, and so were compressed for best results in that medium.

2 - Is that more dynamic range is usually better - but - there are many other factors that can influence sound quality.   There are many recent audiophile releases of 40 and 50 year old recordings, but in many cases, the original master tapes have lost magnetism and so the timbe of instruments do not sound right, and many other small details are lost.  So, even if it is remastered by a meticulous audiophile engineer who gets a high DR rating, the actual sound is not as good.  An example is "Close to the Edge".  The master tape pretty much died some years back (as verified by one of the engineers who did a recent remastering), so even though there are recent audiophile remasterings, the best sounding version is still the early 90's CD done by Barry Diament.

In short, there is no magic number that indicates better sound quality.

[blgentry]

Added it as a field. Amazing! Thank you so so much, this is really really useful.

How accurate is it?

I've compared a half dozen albums analyzed with MC to entries at dr.loudness-war.info/ .  In almost every case I've found the DR numbers to match identically.  I had one anomaly yesterday where several songs from an album had much higher DR numbers in MC.  I re-analyzed one track and it dropped to the value listed in at loudness-war.  I re-analyzed the whole album and they all matched when I was done.  Very odd, as I had just imported that album after ripping it with XLD like I've done with something like 200 other albums without noticing that difference.

Bottom line, it appears to be accurate. 

Brian.

[Frobozz]

I did find one album that calculated a different DR value for a track compared to the Foobar plugin.
See this thread: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=90296.0

But I haven't really looked for others.  The DR calculation in Media Center does what it needs to for my uses.  So I haven't pursued looking for other tracks that may get calculated differently.

If you're going to upload DR values to dr.loudness-war.info you'll want to use the Foobar plugin anyways because it creates a log that you can use to upload the values to the site.  Plus, the Foobar plugin is the standard tool they're using there.

[blgentry]

If you're going to upload DR values to dr.loudness-war.info you'll want to use the Foobar plugin anyways because it creates a log that you can use to upload the values to the site.  Plus, the Foobar plugin is the standard tool they're using there.

If you look at the upper right corner of the loudness-war site, you'll see "Links".  That has 3 pieces of software:  The Foobar2000 plugin, a windows standalone utility, and a Mac standalone utility.  I've tried the Mac utility and it works, but NOT with FLAC files!  So it's essentially useless for me since that's 99.9% of my library.  Not sure about the windows version.

Brian.