Hello,

I recenlty started using Media Jukebox to sort my APE files. I was playin' around with the settings and used the replay gain setting. I didn't realize however that they replay gain information is posted on the file as well. I usually use Winamp to play my music. I don't think that Winamp uses the Replay Gain code, and i couldn't hear a difference between the original wav and the Replay Gained Ape file.

My real question is will having the Replay Gain code in the Ape file mess up anything when i revert to wav if i want to burn the whole cd again? I picked APE cause i could revert to Wav at any time and it would be the original sound file. Does Replay Gain code mess any of this up?

Thanks

You could decode a replaygained ape file back to wav and compare it to the original wav. Or compare ape file before/after replaygaining it. If the only difference is some additional ape v1 or ape v2 tags at the end of file, you can be sure that the file would still be decoded to original wav.

Thanks,

Another question, is their anyway to get Winamp2 to use the Replay Gain information when it plays back? I like the replay gain feature, but i prefer using Winamp to play back.

Winamp Preferences - Plug-ins - Input - <pluginname> - Configure

If the plug-in used to decode the format you want to use has a ReplayGain option, it'll be available on the config window for that plug-in. I know their Vorbis plug-in supports ReplayGain, but as for other formats I don't know. Use the above steps to find out for the plug-in/format of your choice.

Edit: Here is the link to a Monkey's Audio input plug-in for Winamp (if you don't already have it). The webpage and reviews don't specifically mention ReplayGain support, though.

Winamp 2 has option to normalize playback: you can normalize to 90...100% if peak is below 60...100%. That makes me think monkeys audio stores only peak value for each track and does not work like "normal" replaygain. Also when I was using winamp for playing ape files, the only option of making all tracks equally loud was to normalize ape playback and greatly increase volume for mpc and ogg vorbis, because monkeys still plays ridiculously loud. Unfortunately mp3 plugin has no option of additional adjustment of playback volume so mp3 files would be very quiet (i.e. normal).

Lack of proper replaygain support, limitation to windows only and resource intensive decoding (especially at extra high compression - the most popular mode among majority ) were enough reasons for me to transcode all my apes to flac.

Monkey's audio (ape) stores correct Replay Gain information.

If the Winamp plug-in doesn't respond, then that's probably the author trying to make you switch back to Media Centre. (Monkey's author = Media Centre author = Matt).


I don't know what happens in practice, but in theory you could choose whether to have the replay gain adjustment applied when decoding ape > wav.

Cheers,
David.

I don't know if it still applies, but in the past, Media Jukebox used its own tag name for the Replay Gain data and the Winamp plugin did not recognize that tag name. Also, MJ set the Replay Gain level to the original 83 dB and probably will until the people at J. River hear from David Robinson (hint hint) that the new standard for computer audio is 89 dB (the theatre business may continue to use 83 dB on their calibrated audio systems).

Media Jukebox dumps the replay gain info into a media jukebox specific tag on mp3s (and probably other formats). But since APE is Matt's own format, I thought he'd be consistent with this one. Maybe not. As he wrote both pieces of software involved (Media Jukebox, Winamp APE plug-in), it's not unreasonable to expect them to talk to each other. If they don't, see the suggested reason in my previous post.


If J River want to use 83dB, that's up to them. It says 83dB on the Replay Gain website, and always has. I'm not getting involved in trying to make people do ReplayGain this way or that way - it doesn't work. People have their own ideas, which is largely a good thing - though it can be frustrating at times!

Cheers,
David.