Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: [TOS #6: cross-posting] From: R128GAIN: An EBU R128 compliant loudness (Read 1919 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

[TOS #6: cross-posting] From: R128GAIN: An EBU R128 compliant loudness

Hi,

This seems to be 'living' forum on EBU-R128 ...

I stumbled upon a website on ReplayGain specification 2.0 ( http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...0_specification )
I don't know who is working on it or what the progress is, but there doesn't seem to be activity on that forum since october 2012.
But I have a suggestion for the spec, based on the experimentation I've done with R128GAIN and Foobar2000 (1.2.9) implementation of R128. So here it goes:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....c=89841&hl=

I did some experimentation with the replaygain calculation in Foobar2000 (v1.2.9) which uses “libebur128”, a library that implements the EBU R 128 standard for loudness normalization. The four replaygain meta-data tags written by Foobar2000 using the R128 loudness standard are interpreted correctly and playback in another player was no problem (I tried Musicbee). Obviously the values calculated using the 'old' algorithm and the 'new' algorithm are different. It would be nice if the specification would add additional meta-data to make that distinction. I have also tried the R128GAIN software and it generates the following additional tags:

REPLAYGAIN_ALGORITHM = EBU R128
REPLAYGAIN_REFERENCE_LOUDNESS = -23.00 LUFS

Now, libebur128 used in Foobar2000 follows the offset recommendation [1] mentioned in the Replaygain 2.0 spec. It sets the reference level to -18 instead of -23. Which makes sense for music playback on portable devices and correlates well with the old replaygain loudness values. That could be reflected as:

REPLAYGAIN_ALGORITHM = EBU R128
REPLAYGAIN_REFERENCE_LOUDNESS = -18.00 LUFS

So if these two additional tags would become part of the specification, then a clear distinction could be made how loudness was calculated and against which reference level replaygain is adjusted (1 LU = 1 dB)

Any thoughts on that ?


----------------------------------------
NOTES
[1] Based on the research of Dolby Laboratories as published in May 2010 for the Audio Engineering Society. EBU-R128 is for the broadcast industry but music playback on mobile devices suggests a higher playback level.
http://www.dolby.com/uploadedFiles/Assets/...dia-Players.pdf