I have a question about doing the equivalent of MP3 Gain album analysis with APE files.

I’m in the process of burning my CDs (using EAC) and encoding them to MP3 files (using LAME a.p.s.) for my portable player and to APE files (using Monkey’s Audio) for my home stereo system. I store the APEs on an external HD and play them through my home system using J River’s Media Jukebox. To prevent clipping and to prevent wild volume changes on the MP3s, I use MP3 Gain after I encode them. I use the album analysis function and apply the album gain since I want to keep the relative volume differences between songs on the same album intact.

On my APE files, however, it’s not that simple. I have used the Replay Gain function that comes loaded on Media Jukebox. My understanding, though, is that this does a radio analysis of my tracks, which I understand to be the equivalent of track analysis in MP3 Gain. This equalizes the volume on my songs, but it destroys the relative differences within albums, boosting soft tracks to “too loud” a volume compared to loud tracks. My question is this: is there an equivalent of MP3 Gain’s album analysis that I can use on my APE files? Alternatively, is there anything I can do within MJ to effect the equivalent of an album gain, as opposed to a radio gain, when using the player’s Replay Gain function?

Although I haven’t done it, I know that there are ways to do a Replay Gain album analysis directly on the WAV files for a particular CD before I encode them to APEs. (WaveGain?) I would rather not do this, however, because (a) it sounds like it would be yet another thing to learn how to do and would be a bit of a pain and (b) more importantly, as I understand it, that would alter the WAV files themselves, rendering them (and the APE files that would be created after encoding) no longer exact copies of what’s on the CDs, i.e., it would no longer be “lossless.”

Any suggestions? Thanks for any insight.

Only program I know of that can do it is foobar2000.

Since Foobar supports Replaygain my question is very simple.

Why not use Foobar as your jukebox instead of MJ? What features do you need that Foobasr doesn't support?

Is there any method of adding replaygain and then reading it back other than through Foobar?

Foobar has no support for Milkdrop (that I'm aware of) which is essential to me..

I use MJ only because I started with it and am used to it. If there isn't a stand-alone program that will do an album gain on discrete collections of APEs (and it sounds so far like there isn't one), then I may need to switch.

One clarification. MJ does support ReplayGain. It's just that it only supports the radio, or track, gain function. I am assuming from the responses that Foobar2000 supports the album gain function for APE files. That is, that I can analyze each individual album, thereby maintaining relative volume differences within each album, but also roughly equalize volumes across all my APE tracks so that one album doesn't sound a lot louder or softer than the others. Is that right?

Thanks again for the help.

Hi Trial, welcome to Hydrogenaudio!

I'm not familiar with Media Jukebox, but from what you've said, it sounds like it only reads the Track Gain value from APE files, and there's no way to tell it to use Album Gain instead.

Just to make sure that MJ doesn't read Album Gain values, try using Foobar2000 just to "Gain" the APE files as an album. (That's pretty much all I use Foobar for, anyway. ) To do this, install Foobar, drag your APE's into the window, select an album (click on the first track, shift-click on the last track), then right-click and choose Replaygain -> Scan selection as album. You might also be able to do all your APE's at once by bringing them all in and running Replaygain -> Scan selection as multiple albums, but I've never tried that myself. Once Foobar is done, load the re-Gained APE's back into MJ, and see if your problem is solved.

If that doesn't fix the problem, then you'll need to find some way to calculate the Album Gain of each album, then put that Album Gain value into each APE's Track Gain field. You can do that manually with the Replaygain tool in Foobar, but that's too labor-intensive. I'm not sure if you can use Foobar from the command line to change a file's Track Gain, but if you can, then a simple batch file or script would work. You would simply use Foobar to Gain all your APE's, then use a script to copy the Album Gain into the Track Gain.

You shouldn't have to change your playback software just to get over this little hurdle!

Edit: added some instructions on how to use Foobar's Replaygain tool.

Thanks for the replies, especially SometimesWarrior. But using foobar2000 just to do the Replaygain album analysis on my APE files doesn't seem to work. I tried loading APE files from a particular album into FB2K and running an album gain analysis on them. (Thanks for the directions on how to do that.) My intention was that, once I had that figure (which, of course, is the same for all tracks on the album), I would reload the APEs back into MJ and manually input that figure in the place where MJ wants to automatically calculate the track analysis figure.

But I can't figure out how to do that. When I reload the APEs that I have done a Replaygain album analysis on in FB2K, MJ shows that they haven't been replaygained at all. It shows a "?" in the track analysis field. And it won't let me manually input a figure there. So, is there a tag editor that anyone would recommend that would allow me to adjust that figure? Up to now, I've been tagging using MJ, so I haven't had a need for a 3rd party tagging program.

Sorry to be a pain, but I am really hoping for a way to achieve Replaygain album analysis in MJ on my APEs since I am otherwise quite happy and used to the player. Thanks again for any help

To me it doesn't look like you're going to be able to have album gain incorporated into your ape files while using Media Jukebox. I think your only option is to use foobar2000 to do what you are wanting to do correctly. Foobar2000 will write the gain info in the tags of the ape files. I'm not sure how MJ uses replay gain, so by writing replay gain values to your ape tags will work in foobar, they probably will not work in MJ

Now it has. Search for foo_bacon.
Now I enjoy what I enjoyed with Winamp.