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General Audio / Re: 89 db replaygain too much for classical music
Last post by timcupery -The dramatically easier way I've found to do this is to encode to +1.5 or +3 or +4.5 (etc.) db above the target volume, and then use fb2k or mp3gain to lower the resulting file by that same amount. I'm doing this with FB2k, and this may engage some anti-clipping algorithm that I'm not aware of and for which I can't find a switch. I haven't tried it with commandline or LameDropXPd to see if baseline LAME encoder does the same thing.
Here's an example of a song that I'd encoded years ago (original was with LAME 3.92) that I just left much quieter than I'd prefer it to be. Recently I scaled it up to volume that sounded right (it's one of these weirdly-mastered indie songs where RG really misdiagnoses the perceptual loudness) and used the method I described above to get the same RG volume, without any clipping. This peak-lowering only decreased the RG value by 0.12 dB.
Note: I'm unable to ABX-differentiate the no-clipping version from the WAV, even though I did a fair comparison with scaling them down to the volume where the WAV isn't clipping, and just turning up my speakers.
Attached are screenshots showing the RG and peak values, as well as wav exports of those two mp3s (the 100% one has clipped peaks that go up to 189%)