Author Topic: Need help and suggestions about volume analysis and replaygain.  (Read 4855 times)

Analien

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I have so many .mp3's, .flac's, .m4a's etc, etc, and there is such a difference in volume from album to album and genre to genre and smart gain doesn't really seem to work, so I thought I'd spend some days to fix this.  I'm thinking I'll go with albumgain to preserve more silent parts of songs rather intact, but most of all I wonder if I should adjust anything on the db-slider to the right?
But will this fix difference in volumes between different albums and genres? I don't want to have to adjust the volume slider again!

Analien

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Pingaware

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It's difficult to answer. Albums as a whole will be adjusted to the average same volume (album gain is definitely the best way to go by the way), but this means that albums with huge contrast in volume might sound quiet or loud compared to the rest of your library. Album production quality I also find makes thinks sound louder or quieter, but I'm positive that's purely psychoacoustics (don't know if that's a word, but it sounds good!). And track audio stream quality also makes a difference - albums with a lot of clipping (RHCP's Stadium Arcadium when downloaded from iTunes springs to mind) I again think sound louder, even though mathematically they're not.

So the basic answer is, yes, mathematically it should make your library sound more consistent. Other things come into it, but it should make things more consistent. The slider should only be used on your library as a whole if you experience the clipping warning on a lot of tracks. For the most part, it's fine to leave it. I actually manually adjust ReplayGain values through the Tag Inspector when MB warns of clipping. This happens so infrequently that it doesn't detract from the volume levelling of ReplayGain. I'd advise checking that any pre-existing tags are fully removed, as the new standard that MB now uses sets a different target volume to the old standard.

And one final thing I noticed - you said smart gain wasn't working. Smart gain is how MB chooses which ReplayGain values to use - tracks not played as part of an album use track gain, others album gain. If you didn't have any ReplayGain tags applied, it's hardly surprising that it wasn't working!
Bold words in my posts are links unless expressly stated otherwise.

Steven

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album gain analyses all tracks in an album and calculates the volume adjustment needed such that the overall album has the same percieved volume as another album, preserving the relative volumes of each track within an album.
When album gain is included, the track gain is also calculated where the track gain is the volume adjust so that all tracks have the same perceived volume.
Its then up to the player to read those tags and apply the adjustment as you configure ie. if you set Track Gain then MB will use the track gain. Smart Gain uses Album gain unless its not available, or you have shuffling enabled in which case track gain is used.
None of this perfect but MB is using the latest recommended replay gain analysis algorithm. If you think a particular album sounds not right you can force the adjustment to be lower/ higher using the slider. Also if the tracks will clip, MB can warn you and you might lower the slider but search the forum for a more detailed discussion on that as it doesnt always matter if a track clips



hiccup

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I have so many .mp3's, .flac's, .m4a's etc, etc, and there is such a difference in volume from album to album and genre to genre and smart gain doesn't really seem to work, so .....

Are you really sure you are using a recent MusicBee version that nowadays uses the so called 'EBU R128' algorithm instead of the older 'ReplayGain 1' ?