Here's a probably really stupid question. I've been setting alot of my friends up with EAC, LAME, and MP3Gain so they can rip good quality tunes for their PC (they refuse to try anything other than mp3).

What generally happens is that they get overly confused by the softwares I'm installing and how to use everything and why. So, I was wondering if there was anyway to intergrate mp3gain into the lame compiles or possibly even EAC (doubt it cos of the semi closed source).

This way, some of the newbies could just open up EAC, rip and encode and automatically have mp3gained files.

I hope I make sense and am not asking something very stupid or talked about before.

you can use mareo to call it after a rip, and do a track gain ...

i have never used mp3gain from the command line, but looking at the help it seems this are the usefull ones:

mp3gain [options] <infile> [<infile 2> ...]

/g <i> - apply gain i to mp3 without doing any analysis
/r - apply Track gain automatically (all files set to equal loudness)
/k - automatically lower Track gain to not clip audio
/m <i> - modify suggested MP3 gain by integer i
/d <n> - modify suggested dB gain by floating-point n

so, we need to first define the command line for a track gain of 89.0 no clipping i think it should be:

mp3gain /r /k /m 89 /d 0 source dest

if this is correct (can somebody confirm?) we can set up then mareo ...

I can't think of a straightforward way round the issue that EAC launches the encoder for each individual track whereas in most cases I would think people would want to apply mp3gain album gain.

if you want album gain, it is gonna be really tricky, but i'm pretty ok with track gain, and that is what i use ... at least on my collection, (500+ CDs), i don't know of many cds where the songs vary that much on an album ...

so, can anyone confirm this command i posted?

Some live recorded, mixed or classical can be such an example.

MP3gain defaults to 89dB so you don't really need the /m or /d switches.

ok, a quick thought on my head and this is the "action line" that should be included on mareo.ini after the one of the mp3 action lines ....

mp3 NONE NONE mp3gain.exe /r /k /m 89 /d 0 "@source@" "@dest@"

i know now that /m 89 and /d 0 can be omited, cause that is the default, but you can change if wanted