Hi guys,

Please excuse the noob questions, but I was unsuccessful in finding answers in my searching in this forum and in google. If I've missed the obvious answers, please just post me a link to it.

I'm encoding my entire CD collection to FLAC. Then I'm planning to use foobar2k to encode with LAME a-p-s (or maybe vorbis q=6), and add replaygain.


Questions:

1. Should I do the encode and replaygain simultaneously? I saw in the foobar diskwriter page a checkbox called "use replaygain", which I'm assuming will automatically replaygain the track after encoding. Or should I encode everything first, and then do a big replaygain session afterwards?

2. I've seen talk of replaygain by track, and replaygain by album, but I'm not sure what the distinction is. Do I need to worry about that (i.e. do i need to replaygain groups of files by album for best results)? I'm guessing this will affect how I do #1.

In short, please advise what is the best order of operations in foobar for my big encode-and-replaygain from my flacs. Ideally, I'd like to just start something, and leave it running overnight, encoding and replaygaining.

Thanks in advance,
-John

For a start, don't tick 'Use ReplayGain' in the diskwriter options, this will use ReplayGain to permanently adjust the gain on all your encodes in MP3 or Vorbis. In other words, don't do it. You need to ReplayGain your MP3/Vorbis files after you have encoded them. Furthurmore, most people around here use ReplayGain Album Based. This is designed to make the peak level of all albums you have ripped the same. ReplayGain Track based makes the peak level of all songs the same (i.e. like you're listening to a radio station). If you're ripping whole albums use ReplayGain Album Based.

It also depends, in my opinion, on what you want those MP3/Vorbis files for.
Of you are transcoding to use on a portable, I would recommend to check the "Use ReplayGain" option because this would adjust the volume of your files permanently, which is a must --again, IMHO-- for portable use.

This is what I do when I transcode to produce 128k files to listen on the road.

As AtaqueEG says, it depends a lot on what you want to do with the MP3's

I have 3 sets for different purposes: The ones I listen to at home, which have album gain info added via foobar's replaygain component, the ones I listen to at the office, which use track gain (again, via foobar) and the ones I listen to in the car (which has a Sony radio with MP3 support) or in my daughter's mini system, (Philips, which also happens to choke on ID3v2 tags ), which get permanently MP3gained and stripped of any ID3v2 tags before burning to CD-R.

Whatever you choose, you can select "scan files as different albums" in foobar to have album gain, or choose "scan per-file track gain" to have track gain. As long as the "album" tag is correct, you shouldn't have any problems.

I'm not quite sure that you can encode and then do the replaygain scan in just one go, though... (in fact, I can't think of a way to do it using foobar, but I'm no expert!)


Cheers, Joey.