mp3gain drawbacks?
Reply #19 – 2008-06-09 21:54:16
Replaygain by design does not save the target/reference! It is just asumed, that by convention, it is always 89dB (basically, the 89dB reference IS part of the replaygain specification!) And that's exactly how MP3Gain stores the tag information. No matter what the user has set in the GUI, the actual stored information is based on the 89dB reference. If a user has their "target" set to 95dB and they use Track Gain on a file, then if someone else opens that file in MP3Gain with the default 89dB target, they will see that the file is about 6dB too loud and should be turned down. The user-adjusted "target" is only used inside the currently-running GUI. Thats true. However, as long as the undo-information is available, there cannot really be any permanent problem anyways. The part of my argument which you quoted, was only relative to the following scenario: 1. Undo information is lost 2. Trackgain was used 3. Different reference was used 4. Multiuser-Situation In that case, it may be impossible to get the files of multiple users to be similiar in loudness - they are in terms of loudness permanently incompatible with each other. I should probably have explained those conditions more clearly. On first sight, it may seem like an unprobably exception-case, because of the sheer number of conditions. But think again: 1. Tags aren't a safe place to put "backups" 2. Trackgain isn't that unpopular with people who listen to mixed playlists 3. mp3gain via its UI encourages users to change the reference - and the loudness-war combined with lack of RG-amp settings in players, and lack of powerful preamp creates a need for changing the reference. 4. Music nowadays is no longer a purely "individual" phenomenon. The main reason why things like that bothers me, is that they are counterproductive to ever establish replaygain as a mainstream-standard..... something which is in any kind of hifi-components, etc. For something like that to get mass-adoption, it needs to be simple and "just work".... joe average doesn't want to care about "references"... he just wants to know that he just needs to buy a player with a "replaygain-feature" - and into which you can then just load music and press a "trackgain-mode" or "albumgain-mode"-button (with the player automatically doing the scanning beforehand, so that the user doesnt even need to care about scanning files).