I just used Wavegain on a set of waves before i compressed them to MP3 with the 3.90.3 and -aps and the file size decreased by about 17% compared to when i compressed before using wavegain. Is it normal to see such a huge decrease in file size when you do this?

Also, is there really any quality lost at all when using wavegain with heavy noise shaping? Thats what i used and i don't notice anything different about the quality, just wondering what other people think about it.

The only problem i see with doing this is the huge amount of extra time it takes to do, it would be nice if you could set up eac to extract to waves and then run wavegain on them right away, and then compress them so you wouldn't have to do all that work yourself.

The Wavegain vs. MP3Gain thread should answer all your questions.
The general consensus is to use the given --scale value when replaygaining before encoding. Dithering might add unwanted side effects to encoding and you minimalize quantization noise compared to the un-dithered WaveGaining.

dev0

Quite the thread there I'll probably finish reading it tomorrow morning but so far it has tons of answers. How i do go about using the --switch? I'm not exactly a lame pro here. I'm guessing the thread will answer that question eventually, but maybe you could give a quick answer here too.

basically for album gaining, just run wavegain -a -C "c:/path_to_mp3_folder", write down the scale value it spits out, then plug it into lame like so:



Now you avoid the wavegain dithering problems, save space, and get an exact replaygain match (vs an mp3gain approximation)

Hope that helps!