Replaygain for winamp 2 plugin is released!
One of my favorite program of all time. The replaygain value is store in a database file, instead of in the song itself. That way, closed format, wma: vqf, ra, etc can also take the advantage of replaygain.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~walterln/replaygain/

v0.5 2002-05-23

- increased peak precision to 5 decimals
- added option to skip files already in database
- added option to ignore filepaths
- some bugfixes and gui changes
- analyzing now works for last file in playlist
- added hard limiter
- added Frank Klemm to credits (sorry I didn't credit him before)


What is it?

This plugin will calculate a Replay Gain value for music files you play in
Winamp. Once it has calculated this value, the next time you play this file the
gain that was calculated for that file is applied to the file, which means that
the volume will be changed.

The goal of this is to have all files have roughly the same volume, so you
don't have to adjust the volume each time a new song starts playing.

For a better explanation, see http://www.replaygain.org/

--
Discarding of calculations

This is a Winamp DSP plugin. It can look at all samples which are sent to the
output plugin (and usually, your soundcard). If you play a file normally, the
plugin will have seen all samples. This is necessary to calculate the Replay
Gain value - all samples must have been analyzed. If you stopped playback of
the song early, or skipped over some part of the song (seeking), the plugin
will not have analyzed all samples, and this means the calculation will be
discarded.

The plugin determines whether or not to discard a calculation by comparing the
the playing time of the song from the playlist (in seconds), and the playing
time which the samples received represent (usually accurate to 1/44100 second).
If the difference is more than a few seconds, it is likely that not all samples
were played and the calculation is discarded.

The Replay Gain and peak amplitude values of files are stored in
<Winamp DSP plugins dir>replaygains.csv. You can import this file into Access,
Excel or any other database/spreadsheet you like. Of course you can also export
it again, e.g. when you have manually modified a certain Replay Gain value for
a specific file.

does this plugin have album gain?

No. This is a feature I would like to add, but it is kind of difficult to implement in a Winamp DSP plugin. I don't think the album gain can be inferred from the track gains, lengths and peaks alone (it isn't simply a weighted average), so I'll have to store extra data in the database so that any combination of tracks can be combined to an album gain.

I don't think wma works, because the wma input plugin disables DSP or alternate output plugins as Microsoft thinks it can prevent people from getting the raw audio samples that way (although I figure this would be a piece of cake to crack).

But I don't use wma, so I haven't tried this myself.

I think WMA would work using old Nullsoft WMA plugin, or PP's one.

Both are available at my page, "others" section.

Regards;

Roberto.

wma works. Just output null doesn't work with it. SO getting a replaygain has to be in real time.

i know this is an old request. But could it be possible somehow to get an option to flush "old" entries of files that are no longer needed in the replaygain.cvs.

(I like things neat and tidy)

IIRC you mentioned an option of comparing a (extensive) playlist with the cvs.file and erasing those that weren't present in the playlist. Sounded like an idea to me

Yes, that's certainly possible and is on my todo list for the next version.

This is the first time I use ReplayGain (any kind of it) so please don't flame me.

Some songs become noise when I use the plugin. Is this my fault or a bug?

Are there any plans to store only songs in the database which are inside a specific folder? Eg. only files in C:My Music.

That shouldn't happen. Can you put a small sample online somewhere so that I can test it?



That would be useful, I'll think about it.

I like the idea of an independent DSP for ReplayGain (since this eliminates format specific implementations and potentially consolidates all ReplayGain plugin efforts in one plugin). I posted comments to this effect on the MonkeysAudio forum.

However, I dislike greatly the idea of a database independent of the file format and real-time ReplayGain analysis for several reasons:
* all ReplayGain data is lost if either the database is corrupted/lost or one uses a different hardware or software player.
* no batch analysis (a la MonkeysAudio encoding/tagging) or the bazillion other batch encoders/taggers.
* related to the prior, constant discard of in progress analysis because analysis is slower than realtime on a PIII-500 w/ 512 MB of RAM.
* assuming there already is a ReplayGain value stored "in-file", it would appear that these are ignored.

Permit me to suggest the following:
* Keep developing the DSP and work with other format authors to remove the ReplayGain engines from their audio format decoders (again, this will leverage the greater community's efforts, eliminate differences between formats, greatly reduce database maintenance, and, perhaps most importantly for format authors--reduce the size of their decoder);

* Use the native format to store and read the ReplayGain value if there is a ReplayGain tag standard for that format.

* Retain the database for formats which don't support ReplayGain tags. Thus, the database is relegated to secondary status, with the assumption that most formats do or will support a ReplayGain tag "in-file" and, for those that don't, users enjoy no less functionality than is currently provided by the DSP.

* Work with Monkeys Audio or whomever, to add a batch ReplayGain analysis GUI that is format neutral. This need not be part of the DSP because the batch analyzer will write its value to the file itself and the DSP will read that.