Convert replaygain to iTunes/iPod volume?, Can this be done & does it make sense? Options

[davelasker]

I'm an experienced Windows programmer, but a digital audio newbie and also a new iPod owner. I'm trying to normalize playback volume through my iPod.

I tried Apple's Sound Check and didn't like the results. Just turning Sound Check on in the iPod makes its output sound terrible, even before any normalization was done in iTunes.

I'm looking for something like iVolume (Mac-only AFAIK) for Windows that manipulates the volume for each track. I'd like to take a crack at building a fb2k plug-in to do this.

I looked at foo_pod, but it seems they are going the Sound Check route. I'm suffering from the delusion that manipulating volume will give better results than Sound Check. Any truth to this?

Info I'm looking for includes:
a) Where & how is the Volume stored in an Apple .mp4 file? Or is it in the iTunes DB? Any pointers to docs on this would be apprecated.
b) Or would it be easier to use the QuickTime API to set the volume?
c) In either case, how are the replaygain db levels mapped to Apple volume levels???
d) Any other forums where I should be asking this question?

Thanks for the help!

Dave

This post has been edited by davelasker: Aug 1 2004, 22:40

[=trott=]

I've been looking for a while now to remove soundcheck tags. When aacgain came out I had the brilliant idea to apply the album gain value to all tracks. Which (mostly) worked, but of course several of those tracks were already in my itunes db and already had a soundcheck value. After aacgain finished with them, the overall volume was decreased. As a result, these tracks are much too silent now.
So far, I only managed to do it by removing them from the library, removing the tag with a tagging program and then re-importing them. Which is time-consuming to say the least. Especially since I don't know which tracks have the problem. (not to mention that aacgain made some seriously wrong decisions with some tracks).
So, even if only for removing the soundcheck value, this would be useful. Apparantly I won't be able to use it for this purpose, it would be great if somebody could add the functionality.
Besides, even if soundcheck and RG tags would be practically the same, this would (for me) be even better. I use another tagger than itunes in any case because of extra functionality, so I could add the volume adjustment and all tags + cover art and then import the whole lot into itunes and be done with it...