an alternative EBU R128 loudness analysis tool using rsgain

[hiccup]

I stumbled upon a utilty that can do EBU R128 loudness analysis that can be setup as an external tool in MusicBee.

"Why would you want that", since MusicBee is already doing a great job with its EBU R128 implementation?
Because it allows for some further tweaking and extra options that MusicBee doesn't have.

The most important one having been requested quite a few times over the years:
An automatic adjustment of the ReplayGain values when clipping is detected.

This tool can do that.

Howto:

- Navigate to: https://github.com/complexlogic/rsgain
- In the right pane, click on the current release version. (v3.1 when I wrote this)
- Download the Win64 version.
- Extract the zip to a location of your choice.

In MusicBee navigate to: Preferences > Tools
  set it up like this



This is what I currently have under parameters:

Code

custom -o d -l -21 -a -c a -t -s i "<URLs>"

After you completed that you can select files to be processed by using Send To > External Tool
(mouse right-click, hotkey, toolbar icon, etc.)

One drawback of using an external tool like this is of course that you will need to make MusicBee rescan the newly processed files so the values will be recognised and used.

The parameter as constructed above will aim for -21 LUFS (which I personally find a good setting for my use and rather eclectic music library.
If you want your music (or podcats etc.) louder or softer you can change the "-l -21" parameter.
E.g. setting it to -18 will make it a bit louder, equating to what MusicBee currently calls 0dB.

The '-c a' parameter makes sure all files are checked for clipping, and their album or track ReplayGain values being adjusted to prevent that.
So no more interruptive warnings or the need to take action by manually re-adjusting values per track or album!

The '-t' parameter makes the tool check for inter-sample peaks. This may slow down the processing a little bit, but it will be more precise in detecting possible clipping problems.

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For now I have only played around with it for a short time. (and I am also not very savvy/comfortable with this command line stuff)
So I am still in a testing phase before deciding to fully deploy it or not.

There are a few things I haven't been able to figure out yet.

1. The tool is supposed to perform significantly faster if it is set to use more cpu cores.
    There is a mention about that in the documentation, but I haven't been able to make it work.
    On my pc it seems to use no more than 4 cores no matter what I try.

2. For Opus files the tracks will get 5 LU higher loudness values due to the fact Opus made a non-standard mess of its ReplayGain implementation.
    It should be possible to fix that by using 'presets' files that can have dedicated values per coding format. (mp3, flac, opus, etc)
    But I haven't been able to make that work yet either.

So: I am very interested in what other users may be able to achieve with this…

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Some links:

The github page of rsgain:
https://github.com/complexlogic/rsgain

Some good info on it on hydrogenaudio:
https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Rsgain