Hello everyone,

I've spent the past few days researching digital music and found this site which is awesome. I think I might be hanging out here a lot.

What I have been wondering and I am hoping someone can help me with is...

I started playing around with replay gain support and love the idea; however, I am finding that EVERY program seems to implement it in a different way. Frustrating to say the least because I have been wasting hours trying to figure it all out.

There are 4 things I guess that are important to me.

1) What programs can do the analysis and write to the tags (I have MP3gain and it's ok)

2) a program that can use the information that is written in the tags (MediaMonkey says they support it but it doesn't recognize the MP3gain info)

3) portable support (which I don't think exists right now)

4) which music format is best for this ( I was reading that APE tags support this...and maybe that is my problem because I am using MP3 currently.

What I am interested in knowing most is what software supports the STANDARD replay gain information based on the above 4 criterias.

Of course an all in one solution would be perfect but I doubt that exists. I don't mind doing the analysis outside the program that I use to manage and/or play my music. There isn't one program that does everything I want anyway. But I would like to follow some sort of standard if possible, all the way through down to a portable device.

Thanks for listening

Have you tried foobar2000? I'm not sure how well it supports portables (as I don't have one), but I believe there does exist a plugin for at least supporting iPods. foobar2000 can perform the ReplayGain analysis and use it for playback with nearly any format (MP3, MPC, OGG, etc.). You can get it at http://www.foobar2000.org/

Yes I have tried foobar2000 and it *seems* to match the information that mp3gain makes but I was hoping someone would know if these and/or other programs follow the standard replay support. The problems is that unless someone tells me I have no idea which implementation is a hack or official support and i don't want to work with a hack otherwise I will stick with what I have now.

Also since everyone has a different implementation, that was the reason I was asking here so that if anyone knows what supports the official replay standard based on the 4 items I mentioned (analysis, playing, portable support and file format). Not just saying they support it and then another program not being able to understand it that DOES support it officially.

Winamp with in_mpg123 supports replaygain for mp3. It supports it for Vorbis by default, and the FLAC and mpc plugins do as well.

As a sidenote, I was hoping that they would have had this information on the official replay site but it says that currently there is no software that officially supports it but it is possible that the website is out of date...which I am hoping for.

Trust me that is out of date. My plugins apply it and I can tell because I've told them to turn it off and it got louder.

I just installed it and couldn't get it to work

I will play with the settings some more though.

I just found that foobar works with MP3Gain but I am not sure if either of these software is a proper support of replay.

I also read on this forum that foobar has problems with MP3gain (which is another reason why I am wondering if it's standard support).

I also read that ape tags have replay built in, and since I am wondering about file formats as well and see that MPC is supported greatly here and it supports ape, would it be better to go to MPC and avoid the issues of MP3gain using a mix of id3 and ape tags for support (geesh this is getting too complicated).

Thanks for your suggestions.

Personally there is nothing wrong with mp3, but I myself no longer use it. I mostly use Vorbis since I own an iRiver portable. I'd really recommend Vorbis or MPC if you want Replaygain support. They are stored as Vorbis comments and APE tags, respectively. I'm not sure but I think mp3 replaygain is stored in an APE tag as well which I think conflicts with ID3v2 but I'm not 100% sure.

I'd give you information on foobar but I don't really use it enough to tell you much about it. I'm too used to Winamp to give it up and I have it modified to my liking.

Wiki:ReplayGain

Cool, that will give me enough information to figure out what I would like to do.

Thanks

mp3gain does NOT use tags to store replaygain info - it modifies the mp3 directly. It only stores UNDO-data in the tags.

Fb2k goes the opposite route and instead does it via tags. Also, fb2k can use replaygain with any fileformat (in the worst case its only written to fb2k's internal db, but not to the files) - mp3gain, as the name implies, only supports the mp3-format.

So, both apps are as different as they can get in that regard.

I was recently very confused about ReplayGain so I did some research and wrote this post --->

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....topic=24527&hl=

HTH

mp3gain DOES store replaygain info in the tags.

From mp3gain site:

What do these "tags" in the new Beta version do?
Store analysis and undo information inside the mp3 itself. You no longer need to analyze an mp3 more than once

mp3gain DOES store replaygain info in the tags.
[/quote]

PHEW.....that freaked me out, I thought I just screwed up my 6000 songs for a second.

Either Lyx and me got something wrong, or you did... MP3Gain modifies the actual MP3 files, while storing undo information in the tags. The whole process can be undone losslessly, though, AFAIK.

yes, mp3gain can change the actual file, it can also store the info in tags. To check this, just look at file info in fb2k, you should see mp3gain undo info AND replaygain info.