What is your stance on Replaygain support in Vorbis? Options

[Dibrom]

Do you believe it's better to store the data in the actual Vorbis tags, where it's more practical, easier to implement, and more likely to gain widespread support?

Or do you believe that it's better to have each individual player handle replaygain itself because it's "The Right Thing", because having the data in the vorbis tags is too much of a kludge, and because it's not the responsibility or goal of Vorbis to deal with this?

[tw101]

I'm late to this discussion, for I need to study first what ReplayGain is all about. I've never used it before, and now I know why--I listen mostly to classical music, and I've no use of RG.

But I've read through David's web site (to the best of my ability -- I'm a social science guy), and I've read the two recent threads about RG, which I ignored initially.

Still, I have some questions, and hopefully some of don't mind teaching a newbie a thing or two.

Question 1:

If the issue is about putting 4 tags in the user-definable Vorbis tags area, what exactly are you trying to get the Vorbis team to agree to?

Because classical music is my thing, I need quite a few extra tags on my ogg files. I need composers, opus no., original source (from piano rolls to 78 rpm to LP to CD), performers, orchestra, conductor... etc. I don't think I need any permission to create those tags, so if those RG tags are so important to you, why don't you just do it?

What does "official support" exactly mean in this context? You want the vorbis encoder (oggenc) to also do RG caculation and store the tags? Or you want the the libraries to provide functions to read/write the tags? Or you want the reference decoder to be RG-enabled? Or...?

Q2:

IIRC, the decoder has been freezed since RC1, right? The promise was a properly-implemented decoder/player now will be able to decode all future v 1.x files without problem, even if they're encoded with newer version of encoders. If we want the vorbis team to change the requirement so that only a RG-enabled decoder is a compliant decoder, they would have to break the promise, don't they?

This doesn't entail that they should never do it. But I think if this is really the case, their reluctance is at least understandable. Because it's they who have to go explain to everybody why they have broken their promise.

Q3:

Monty and Emmett never said this, so it could be just my imagination. But is it possible that there's a concern of loss of control? RG's development isn't under their control, and they might fear (legitimately, I think) that they'll have modify their specs again if something is changed on the RG front.

Q4:

About the number of tags. I don't really get why tags other than the track gain tag are necessary. Yeah, I understand the concept of maintaining the relative loudness between tracks within an album. But if you're really listening through an album, isn't adjusting the volume knob once enough for the whole album?

I guess I probably misunderstood something there, but my impression is that with those album gains, album peak, etc. you can listen through several albums without having to adjust the volume? Assuming that's correct, it's cool. But is it that important? To have three tags per file just to avoid tuning the volume once per album?

I guess some ideas are just hard for a non-RG fan to comprehend. I adjust volume depending on more factors than the loudness of the recording itself. It has to depend on the environment, time of day, what I'm doing, whether I'm wearing a headset or not...etc. I certainly can't program all these into the tags.

I do see the benefit of the track gain setting (radio mode), when playing mixed songs. But very little beyond that.

I guess all my questions circle back to the first one: if there's really nothing for the vorbis team to do except giving you their blessing, then there should be no problem at all. You write your own tools to write the tags, and ask player plugins or decoders to use them. You don't really need the permission of the vorbis team.

If some things need to be done on their part for this to be useful, then could someone explain Q2 to Q4 to me, please?

Frankly, I quite sympathize Monty and his team (how many people are there?). They've been swamped by demands. Some people want written specs, NOW! Some people want v 1.0, NOW! Some peole want very low bitrate encoding, NOW. Some people want even better audio quality, at even lower bitrate. Some peole wonder why they don't send an army of promoters to hardware player developers and give them their fix point encoder for free. And now this.

I don't know Monty, or Emmett, and I don't know how exactly they feel, but I certainly don't envy their jobs.