Hey guys,

Hopefully someone can help me with this. I just bought a 60GB iPod Photo and am interested in re-ripping all of my CDs to lossless. I'd like to use ALAC (rather than just wav) so I can tag everything.

RIght now I've got it all ripped using EAC+LAME -ape, and every song/album is MP3Gain'd at 89.0db ... I'd like to rip to ALAC, but I want my albums to be replaygain'd to 89.0db like everything else. Is that possible?

Ehhh... probably people who knows more 'bout this but Case has written an ALAC decoder for foobar2000 now, and anything foobar2000 can play it can replaygain too.... or....??? (But for some formats maybe only in fb2k's own database?)

Thanks for the reply.

I don't think that an ALAC decoder for foobar will help with playback on the iPod though, will it?

OK, how about this?

What if I use EAC to rip to wav with a cue sheet, somehow apply replaygain to the wav's, and then use Daemon to mount the cue sheet. Then I can use iTunes to rip from the virtual drive ... would that work?

Does the iPod support replaygain adjustment from values in tags on any format? I don't know much about the thing.....
Why not rip to wav, apply replaygain with WaveGain, then encode to format of choice?

WaveGain thread here.
Compiles for Windows and OS X here.

Actually, yes it should. Since foobar w/ foo_pod supports adding replaygain correction info to all formats the Ipod can play (via soundcheck). Might want to ask Areo if hes ever tested it though (you maybe the first person to try it since ALAC support is so new).

Isn't wavegain a bad idea since that data is better off put into the tags, and not possibly destroying the sound?

WaveGain does alter the files, changing the volume level of the sound. So it's not lossless, even though I would think possibly destroying is a near impossiblity, although not totally impossible. So if a file format and the decoder supports replaygain values in tags, that's the best; as the sound itself then does not get altered in any way whatsoever. But, my question where; Does the iPod use replaygain values in tags to attenuate the playback level when decoding? I don't own such a device. If the iPod does not use replaygainvalues in tags when decoding, then such an approach will be useless, as mavis wants replaygained playback from the iPod. In such a case, using WaveGain before processing could be a viable approach. And mark that mavis wants to re-rip CD's, in which case there's a backup if things should not be satisfactorily, and all will not be lost....

But then, as Mr. Giacomelli pointed out, checking out what foo_pod can or can't do is probably a smart thing. As I don't need it I know nothing of it, but there's a thread going over there.

Not as such, no. Not directly anyway.

The iPod doesn't understand tags, of any kind. It reads all it's information from a file called iTunesDB. This file is written by the computer at the time of synching. By foo_pod, if you're using it.

Each entry for a track in this database has an entry called "SoundCheck". This is a converted form of the dB adjustment to apply to the track. When SoundCheck is enabled on the iPod, this adjustment will be applied.

foo_pod reads ReplayGain information from foobar 2000, and puts it in the SoundCheck field. So whether the file has RG tags or not is not important, as long as foobar 2000 knows the RG levels and can pass them to foo_pod on request. This may require the file to have these tags or it may not, whatever. foo_pod and the iPod don't directly care about tags, as such.

Thanks for clarifying!
In such a case mavis could be well advised to test whether foobar2000 with Case's foo_alac and Aero's foo_pod would do the trick....

Although after spending three hours adding album art to all of my songs, I'd really like to use it - it's my understanding that foo_pod won't transfer the art ...

Nope. Aero lost his iPod Photo in a cab somewhere, I believe. So work on that is sorta suspended on that for a while. And he's out of the country for the next couple of weeks too.

It could likely be done without buying Aero a new iPod though. He'd need somebody to sync a bunch of songs with iTunes and then send him the contents of the iPod_Control directory (minus the music directory) so he could look at the files and see how it works. Even then, it's still problematic. foobar doesn't support reading album art inside the tags, so he'd have to add tag libraries for the various formats in order to read the tags directly and get the art out.

Basically, I think it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. Sorry.