Why to replaygain lossless?

2004-03-12 21:11:50

Hi folks,

this is my first post on HA, although i'm reading since two month...
please forgive my rather poor english because it's not my native language and
if this questuion was answered before...forgive    ...a search did not satisfied my needs...

i ripped some of my black-metal albums to ape's including the cue-sheet, logs and
replaygain information. After thinking a bit about the process i wonder why replaygain-information is neccessary in lossless files. There's not quantization process so no values could clip at the decoding-stage. The only reason why one could use it, if you mix it with some lossy replaygained files in a playlist...

am i completly wrong?

regards
pest

Why to replaygain lossless?

Reply #1 – 2004-03-12 21:15:14

Different albums are recorded at different levels (different volume). If you want all your songs to play at same volume you need ReplayGain.

Why to replaygain lossless?

Reply #2 – 2004-03-12 21:19:31

thanks...

that's clear, but there's no need to prevent some lossless files to clip?
and if i only use the files to convert them to mp3 for example there's no need to include replaygain information because i woul gather it after the encoding stage...

pest

Why to replaygain lossless?

Reply #3 – 2004-03-12 23:00:44

> ...no need to prevent some lossless files to clip?

No...

For example: in the conversion chain CDA>wav1>flac>wav2, wav1 = wav2.

RG sets the upper limit at 89 dB to allow for some headroom if doing a lossless>lossy conversion...because the lossy conversion can push peak values up to and over the limit (fullscale = 2^16) for 16 bit files.

xen-uno

Why to replaygain lossless?

Reply #4 – 2004-03-13 00:08:33

> RG sets the upper limit at 89 dB to allow for some headroom if doing a lossless>lossy conversion...

xen-uno

insn't it saver to convert to lossy without RG and apply
it after it?

1. mp3 get's exact RG
2. mp3 is as close as possible to the original wav


if i only store the files on dvd-r, without listening to them, but as time comes by converting them to lossy i could left RG info...

pest

Why to replaygain lossless?

Reply #5 – 2004-03-13 16:03:58

pest,

To answer the question, "Why to replaingain lossless":

1. For playback of lossless encodes on players supporting replaygain. (you don't plan to do this)

2. Transfer the replaygain metadata to future lossy encodes (saving you the effort of recalculating). I think the consensus is that this is "safe" because the calculated value will be very close. 

3. Normalize the volume of future encodes for players that don't support replaygain.

I hope this answers your question.

Why to replaygain lossless?

Reply #6 – 2004-03-13 18:50:55

@shday

thanks these where the answers i was looking for...

pest

Why to replaygain lossless?

Reply #7 – 2004-03-13 20:54:08

Replaygain is NOT about clipping - thats just a nice bonus which players who support replaygain usually offer.

Replaygain itself is just about making all your music the same loudness. And for that to archive, it its trivial if a file is lossy or lossless encoded.

As to why to do replaygain lossless (via tags, etc) instead of lossy(directly changing the waveform): every change to the waveform lowers its quality. In adition to that, doing replaygain in a lossless way (i.e. tags) makes undo possible - if you do lossless replaygaining then whatever happens, you can always go back to the original version by simply removing replaygain info.

This can be more handy, than you may think. For example, just some days ago i stumbled over an album which has seamless track-transition. The tracks were normalized seperately during the ripping process - of course this led to the track-changes no longer being seamless because of volume-jumps. If lossless replaygaining would have been done to "normalize" the tracks, then the damage could have been undone - but since the waveform itself was changed there was no possibility to repair the damage, because the original volume of the songs was unknown.

- Lyx