ok, i know normalizing files is not a lossless process and therefore unacceptable to me. my understanding is that realplaygain is supposed to allow a player to play various music at the same volume level and is a lossless process.

here's my problem ... i like to assemble my own versions of albums, cutting out an occasional song that annoys me and adding in singles and b-sides not on the original album. sometimes the added in songs don't match the volume level of the rest of the album. i thought the realplaygain feature in flac would solve this problem assuming i encoded all of the files as one album but it certainly does not. any way to get these added songs sounding like they always belonged?

Scan the main album "as album", and then each song you want to add "as album", I guess it would work

i'm not sure i understand your answer ... if you're saying i should flac the files with realplaygain checked and "treat input files as one album" checked then that's what i already said did not work in my initial post. i thought it would work but it does not - the songs play at substantially different levels.

If I were in evilolive's shoes, I would remove album gain tags from the newly added files.

The player software (assuming it supports Replay Gain tags) should then play the added songs so that the perceived volume of the new tracks equals the perceived volume of the existing album.

edit1: removed typo

edit2: And I'm assuming all tracks are in separate files, with no cuesheets or embedded cuesheets being used.

edit3: And I'm assuming he's using either album gain or no replay gain at playback. If you don't have Replay Gain volume modification on playback, get it and/or enable it.

I think you're doing the opposite of what you should be doing.

Are you saying that you're making your compilation, and then scanning as an album? That won't work - scanning it as an album tells ReplayGain that whatever volume differences there are within that album are supposed to be there - so it won't touch them!

You should either use the track gain on everything, or (what I do) is album gain everything in its original context (e.g. 1 album as 1 album, 1 CD single as 1 album etc etc), and then use album gain when playing back your compilation. This will pick up the (different) album gains from each track, and apply them. Result: matching loudness.

(Actually, having that that's what I do, it's not - if I'm just dropping in one or two extra tracks into an existing album to burn back to CD, I match them by ear).

Cheers,
David.