About ReplayGain standard Options

[waaateva]

Hi! I'm new here. I'm sorry if this is posted in the wrong place, I'd appreciate your help!

Please read this first:
I made a suggestion, which I think will improve the current Replay Gain standard. But my strongest point was proven invalid. Other benefits, though existent, may not be worth the hassles of changing an already popular standard. So I guess we'll just leave it as it is .
Thanks for the discussion.

I think RG standard should be changed, so that it stores the actual level of the track, rather than the "gain". Here are my points:

1. Standards should not feel awkward, and the current standard feels very awkward. Don't get me wrong, it works perfectly. But where did that 89dB "reference level" come from? Based on what was it decided? Besides, I'd rather see how loud my track/album is, instead of looking at some (less meaningful) negative numbers.

2. To my knowledge, the reference level used to be 83dB (it's still on the RG homepage), but was later changed to 89dB for some reason. I have no idea how players dealed with that change, really. Now what if it is changed again? Of course updating the gain is a trivial task, but how do we know if the track were updated or not? And which tracks were scanned using which reference level? Storing the actual level is immune to this problem, because it is the logical way to store track loudness.
Not valid.

3. This is the most important. This change will not break any compatibility! All we have to do is add 2 new tag fields: REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_LEVEL and REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_LEVEL. They can be easily calculated from the 2 old "GAIN" fields (assuming the 89dB reference was used). New players will use these new fields and just ignore the old ones, while old players remain compatible. And the "Pre-amp" option will be changed to "Preferred Level", which defaults to 89dB. Makes much more sense to me!

4. It's not too late. Replay Gain is getting more and more attention. My Sansa Fuze has just got RG support via a firmware update, and I'm extremely happy with that. Before RG is widely used or even becomes an official standard, we should improve it as far as we can!

These are only my ideas. I don't know what else to do but post it here . If you are the RG proposer, or a player developer, or have anything to do with the Replay Gain standard, please consider!

Thank you.

This post has been edited by waaateva: Apr 13 2009, 12:19

[tot]

The gain numbers are meaningful. They show how much the track/album must be adjusted to match -20dBFS pink noise. Thus, if the gain is -5dB, the average volume is -15dBFS.

The reference level affects just loudness contour that is used to calculate the average power. For example, 89dB means that if you listen at that SPL level the perceived power levels match.

[waaateva]

The reference level affects just loudness contour that is used to calculate the average power.

Does that mean if the reference level is changed, the "volume level" calculated by RG will change accordingly?
That doesn't seem to be the case with MP3Gain.

This post has been edited by waaateva: Apr 13 2009, 12:22