OK, here's what I have. I have about 1000 cd's ripped to mp3 (please no debate on wether mp3 is a good format or not, or that I should have used somethng else), all in album format. (all complete albums (CD's)) I want to use Replaygain to make the relative volume of all the mp3's the same (I know some will be loiuder or softer by a certain bit ). Do I go into Foobar2k and select everything and Replaygain everything as ona massive album? Also how do I Replaygain things when I add new CD's to my collection?

Replaygain->Scan Selection As Multiple Albums (assuming they're properly tagged)

I can't think of automated way to scan new ones, but scanning is fast and it can skip already scanned albums, so you can just redo the above every now and then.

You can also use MP3Gain, this will also work outside foobar, which can be handy if you use other players.

So scanning as multiple albums will keep all albums in the same general loudness?

In foobar, go to: Preferences->Playback
and set "Replaygain mode" to "use track gain" (in the dropdown list).

This way, every track, regardless of album, will have the same perceived loudness.

Btw: When scanning a selection as an album (or multiple albums), both album gain and track gain info/tags will be added. The "use track gain" setting utilizes the track gain part for playback.

Great, that was what I was looking for. It seems that there is no clear explanation sitting around for newbies to get up and running smoothly. Might be a good project for me.

Use album gain. The process of scanning for album gain also includes track gain. If so desired, you can select this in Foobar2000 later. Then if later on you decide to use album gain, you don't have to scan again.

Cool. I'm now replaygaining my collection by year, oldest to newest.....should only take about 24 hours or so....

1389/10511 as of 10:08 am....

Can I just confirm:

Does this mean that the album gain is done by using the Album APEv2/ID3 tag?

So, if I added ten albums worth of APEs/MP3s the album gain would be correctly done ten times, and not once for all tracks in the playlist?

Yes (assuming the album fields are set correctly).

Cool. Thanks Jasper (and Peter Pawlowski I guess).

Just saw this thread as I use foobar2000 and have not used the replaygain yet until now. Just then I replaygained two songs, and it was a right click on them job, unfortunately they were VBR and really good quality, and I think normalizing killed it volume-wise -- now it sounds like crap and the TBgain is -8.4

I'll take it from the negative 8.4 that I reduced the volume this much?

What do I doooo.. it doesn't sound good to me

I got like 3/4 of my metal albums sounding really good, that last 1/4 is not loud as the others, how do I make it good using replaygain? I think volume is the issue with the 1/4 so it's a replaygain thing...

If there's a manual somewhere link me.. kthx >_<

Just realized it's not permanent sorry...

Also, let the volume knob be your friend. Replaygain does not change the actual audio data, except for gain (volume).

Welcome to the loudness race.

I dont think using track replay-gain is a good idea if you have a lot of gapless songs in your collection.