i have a few albums that are 2 discs or more. should i apply replaygain to each disc seperatly or treat the album as if it were one?

I generally decide this on a case-by-case analysis. When I play the two discs in my copy of The Beatles (the "White Album") back-to-back the relative volume doesn't need to be adjusted between discs, so I treat it as a single album. But when I finally tracked down a copy of Gene Clark's Under the Silvery Moon I discovered that the two discs were mastered about three dB apart - which is easily enough to be a noticeable jump in volume - so I treated them as separate entities.

- M.

This is a question I already asked myself more than once. I always end up treating each cd as if it were separate albuns. This may not be the correct way to do it, though...

cya

Nothing wrong with your approach either. If you always do each disc separately, albums where the discs are similar in volume will be adjusted similarly, and the net effect is roughly the same.

- M.

I always replaygain each disc seperately.

Depends. I usually just rip discs together when they are a proper double-album, with the tracks all in the same folder and the disc 2 tracks numbered 13-22 or whatever. In this case they all get --scaled together.

Some albums have like an "acoustic versions" bonus disc though, which i treat as a separate album entirely. They were usually mastered separately after all, and are not meant to be listened to in the same sitting anyhow.

i copy them into one folder, gain the whole thing and move them back into two seperate folders

Each disc seperately.

Me too!!

ok, i'll probably put both discs into one folder. i will have to rename the files because my file naming is like this: artist\(year) album\track# - title. i'll just continue numbering the files from disc 1, ie: disc 1 ends on track 10 so disc 2 will start with track 11. i probably don't have to do that but i don't want it to replaygain track 1 from disc 1 then go right to track 1 from disc 2. i'd rather it go in the proper order. i don't have many double albums so it won't be too much of a hassle.

I do each disk separately.

can't i just use foobar to replaygain? i would add the double album to the playlist, select all the tracks, and replaygain scan as an album. that would be much faster.

My $0.02...

I generally do each disc seperately, but if I were to run into a "problem child", then I'd throw all tracks into one folder and replaygain them all together, then put them into seperate folders again. Since it would be a rare occasion that this would be required, the manual effort wouldn't be a big deal. Since I haven't noticed an obvious level-difference between discs yet (judging by my ears, not by scale factor amount), I haven't needed to do it so far.

Edit: Minor clarification...

I do it seperately for each disc. Could someone explain me: why it is not possible to modify the plugin so that it'll do album replaygaining based on your playlist? I only use title gains in playback however I think one value regarding perceptual volume for each file should be sufficient for both title based and album based replaygaining. The advantages of such a method:

• It is more natural, because any given track has one perceptual volume associated to it. (Album Gain value information is inherently superficial, and this discussion actually arises because of its artificiality)
• One could do replaygaining inside EAC by running replaygain for each track individually through MAREO. Hence it could be automatized and will not depend on the relative location of files.
• After replaygaining you can always change your decision on how you will interpret your albums and how you want to apply albumgain simply by altering your playlist.