Hi there,

I've searched for help on this topic and have found some help but am still not sure on how to do what I want to do....

Some of my old CD's are very quiet and I'd like to rip them to the HDD, apply replaygain to make them as loud as my other CD's and then burn the louder file to CD.

So far I can rip the files off CD with no problem... Then I apply replaygain to the files. My LOUD Cd's have a gain of around -12dB whereas the quiet ones are at around -7 or -8. I assume then that I need to increase the loudness of the file by around 5dB.

Can anyone tell me how to use replaygain with diskwriter to output a .wav file that is 5dB louder (but otherwise identical to) than the original?

Thanks. I hope that makes sence
Spadge

That will not make them 5dB louder. It will make them 5dB louder than the corrected loud CDs, but it will make them 7dB quieter than they already are. For your loud CDs to match, you would have to re-burn them with their own correction applied, making them 12dB quieter than the originals.

Or, you could manually edit the album gain to the difference between the album gain for your loud albums and the gain for the quiet album, but this is not really a good idea.

You could use preamp to increase the volume. If you want to crank up all your files by 5dB, replaygain won't be necessary (you have to enable it in the diskwriter settings for preamp to work, though). This will, however, introduce clipping, unless you also use the advanced limiter (turn DSP on as well for diskwriter). This will make your CDs louder by compressing the dynamic range, making them sound just as bad as CDs compressed during mastering. I wouldn't do this.

EDIT: So, effectively, you'd disable replaygain under 'Playback' in the Prefs and set Preamp for 'Files WITHOUT RG info' to +5db. Make sure Advanced Limiter is your only active DSP. Enable DSP and Replaygain in diskwriter settings.
But again, this will make your CDs sound louder, but also worse.

So there is no way to make them louder without loosing quality? That kinda sucks.

Thanks for the replies so far though. They've helped explain a few things

EDIT: So the only way to make all my CD's the same volume is to apply replaygain to all the wav files and use diskwriter with replaygain enabled... is that right?

What if I did that and had a +5dB or so preamp... would this introduce clipping? Sorry if I just don't get it... I'm trying

Spadge.

Both your quiet and loud CDs probably already peak at digital full scale. You can either change the dynamics of the quiet CDs to make them louder, or reduce the volume of the louder CDs to make then quieter. But you can't just increase the volume of the quieter CDs without either clipping, distorting, or dynamically compressing the audio.

http://replaygain.hydrogenaudio.org//faq_quiet.html
explains it all.

If you want to dynamically compress your quietest albums, my advice would be this: Look at the ReplayGain value for the loudest album (e.g. -8dB or something) and set the pre-amp to undo this (i.e. +8dB). This means your loudest album is not affected. Your quietest album (ReplayGain probably -2dB or something) is now being pushed much higher than it used to be (-2+8=+6 - i.e. twice as loud). You need to enable soft clipping, hard limiting, or whatever else you can plug into foobar (e.g. a dynamic compression DSP) to bring the peaks back down in range without totally wrecking the audio.

As has been hinted by others, the quality thing to do is to leave the pre-amp at 0 (or even -ve if you have albums with a +ve ReplayGain) and burn everything at that quieter level. No clipping or dynamic compression involved. But if you're using the result in a low powered portable, it might be too quiet.

hope this helps.

Cheers,
David.

Maybe you should just try and see. Try the methodes 2Bdecided and I have suggested on a very loud and a very quiet album and listen to the results.

If the replaygain values for all your files (or albums) are below -5dB, I think it shouldn't. But you can easily find out: just do some transcodes and look at the console, it will display clipping warnings.

I've got my entire music collection on my computer as .ogg files and they are all replaygained. They all have values between +3 and -13. (AlbumGain). When I set the preamp to +12 I don't get any clipping warnings in the console at all.....not using any limiters or anything like that.

Does this mean I can do what I'm proposing with no problems?

Paul

MP3Gain might be helpful.

You can use it to find out max volume without clipping.
Then apply it within foobar2000 manually and use diskwriter with replaygain enabled.

Uncheck "Use peak info to scale down tracks that still clip after applying replaygain" or else it will never scale anything high enough to cause clipping.