ReplayGain Reference Loudness Options

[foorious]

Hi everybody,

I've noticed that some of my lossless files have a tag field called %replaygain_reference_loudness%, which value is always the same : "89.0 dB" (as one would expect)

AFAIK audio players don't use that field since its value is always the same and it's probably 'hardcoded' somewhere inside the players' cores. For example when you use foobar2000 to calculate ReplayGain, it stores the results in several relevant fields (track gain, album gain...) but it does not store anything in a %replaygain_reference_loudness% field.

So can I assume this %replaygain_reference_loudness% tag field is totally useless and can be safely removed from my files ?

Thanks in advance.

This post has been edited by foorious: Dec 7 2008, 20:04

[benski]

Definitely useless. Targetting a different reference loudness might be good for tools such as MP3Gain which "bake in" the volume adjustment for non-RG players, but doesn't make a lot of sense for Replay Gain. If the target reference level doesn't meet your needs, that's what the pre-amp is for (or the volume knob

That being said, there's always the chance that some RG scanner exists (or will exist) that lets you modify this value, and some unsuspecting user will change the setting.

[Soap]

Is such a tag causing harm? I suspect it is an "aesthetic" choice to remove it? I can't imagine it adds a measurable increase in file size?