The thing with replaygain..., ... and perceived different volume levels. Options

[greynol]

I wonder if there is a way to make replaygain take the human perception of sound into account... after all, we hear with our ears, and those are partial when it comes to sound.

RG already does take this into account, but again, not everybody is the same and I have no idea how closely it follows standard equal loudness curves. Then there's the difficulty in determining what value to use as the peak when dealing with real music.

RG would be a lot less precise if it didn't at least try to take these things into account.

This post has been edited by greynol: Nov 22 2007, 23:58

[buktore]

2Bdecided, Did you already "finished" developing replaygain? No further development?

Cause like you said, it's not perfect. but i perfectly understand that it's would be very hard to improve it and it would be a lot of trouble to implement new version of it because it already standard, but it seem that it still could be done.

Just ask out of curiosity.

[tarsier]

2Bdecided, Did you already "finished" developing replaygain? No further development?

I've been thinking for a while that we need a Replaygain 2.0.

The last few AES conventions have presented research that shows that A weighting isn't as good as other weightings for percieved loudness measurement. Leq(R2LB) seems to show the most promise as a loudness indicator, even though it doesn't have as much experimental data as Leq(RLB). But I don't necessarily think that any Leq measurement is the way to go. I think the original Replaygain statistical analysis was a better method.

So perhaps Replaygain with a R2LB weighting?

I also think there should be a replaygain parameter for "dynamic range" that can somehow be set and used. (some AES papers also make this suggestion.) So for most pop music the dynamic range is small, but for most classical, the dynamic range is large.

Here's a PDF file of a Power Point presentation that touches on this a bit.

[Axon]

ReplayGain uses a custom-built filter that is considerably more complex than R2LB (or RLB). There isn't any well-known intrinsic property about RLB that would make it work any better than the existing RG filter, except that it happens to be more academically tested, and is used professionally a bit more often.

Moreover, the errors between predicted loudness and subjective loudness are still quite large. Look at the Leq(RLB) results: you can't get anything accurate to under 1.5dB. Now look at the HEIMDAL results: with an algorithm probably an order of magnitude more complex than Leq(RLB), and all of that work results in... accuracy to only 1db. Gee, what a big gain. Hardly any estimators work significantly better than Leq(RLB), but I'm tempted to indict the current state of the art rather than praise Leq(RLB) as a superior solution.

In that context, unless there are significant outliers that RG screws up on, I'd doubt that switching to RLB would improve things. Actually, since people are already talking R2LB, maybe somebody should submit the RG filter to the 1770 WG? It's certainly just as reasonable a filter to use, it seems.

[Bourne]

to the Original Poster:

I know what you mean... and this is just mainly because of CD mastering... at least for me it's the only thing that stood out as a symptom. You can go crazy with the most hundred different mastered CDs because each one of them were mixed a certain way and this varies a lot. I don't believe ReplayGain will fullfill those deficiencies, RG is just about volume. But I'll list some things for you to take this out of your mind:

1) Store your music collection as albums.
2) Store your albums by year, old albums will sound quiet, newer, louder. Don't mix up older and newer albums in the same folder.
3) For the stand-alone tracks, try grabbing the tracks you need from compilations that are on a single CD. (Eg. I need 5 Queen tracks from 5 different LPs, but I choose to grab the 5 of them from a compilation CD so they are mastered equally, at maximum having very close year-gap between 2 CDs.
4) Use a pre-amp but that will kill loudness-overall benefit.