Replay Gain: Album Gain vs. Track Gain Options

[pbelkner]

Given a Replay Gain tagged file, at playback time there's usually the choice between applying the album gain or the track gain. Both have their pros and cons but in general neither strategy seems to be perfect.

If we consider album gain as the "natural strategy" because it preserves the loudness difference between an album's individual tracks we may consider track gain as some kind of "deviation" from the "natural strategy" aiming to correct some flaws of the "natural strategy".

Viewed this way the question rises why there shouldn't be a measure allowing us to control the "deviation" in a smooth way from 0% (album gain) to 100% (track gain)? The latest version with the FFSoX Player plugin for WA implements the idea:

What do you think about it? Do you find it useful?

[skamp]

I have to admit, I never shuffle or make custom playlists that aren't made of entire albums. Maybe Replaygain and co. work better over longer pieces music (albums) where anomalies are comparatively small (e.g. the length of an average track). If so, it would be interesting to revise those algorithms.

As for your solution being useful or not: it's obviously useful to you. That should be enough for you to keep and implement that feature wherever you can (unless you don't use your own products!).

[pbelkner]

it's obviously useful to you. That should be enough for you to keep and implement that feature wherever you can (unless you don't use your own products!).

One thing's for certain: that's the driving force for everything I'm doing You can be sure, in the first place I'm writing these programs for myself and I'm using them extensively myself. Hopefully it's useful for somebody else too ...