I want album replay gain for approx. 4000 files. How should I do it in Foobar 2000? Thanx a lot.

Slightly wrong forum, whatever:

- make sure that ALL files are albums and have clean album-tags(this means, every track in an album should have the same tag)
- select all files, and choose "scan multiple albums" (or similiary named)
- scan the non-full-albums in a seperate step with trackgain

Test it on a few albums first before doing it on all files.

If you have albums with the same name (like having 3 "Greatest Hits" albums) you'll need to do those seperately.

But you can use [%artist%] [%album%] or something similar as the grouping pattern, if the need arises.

Only if you have one artist per album. Ideally you would use:

$if2(%album artist%,%artist%) - %album%

as your sorting pattern.

Why is not possible to add replaygain info to ALL files in my collection (4000) like with MP3 gain? Why is it so complicated? I think the only way, but very laborious is to load each album separately and scan them for album gain

You didn't take much time to read the given answers, did you?

Of course it's possible.

In the options you can define how foobar2000 is going to differentiate between two albums. By default it only considers the album title, but if you have two artists who gave their albums the same name they are going to be considered as one. That's probably not what you want, and due to that it was advised to add the artist, too. Navigate to Preferences | Components | ReplayGain scanner and enter %artist% %album% into the edit field. If you use the "album artist" tag, use $if2(%album artist%,%artist%) %album%.

Once you did that, you'll probably never have to change it again.

Now, load all your files into the playlist, select them, right click and chose ReplayGain | scan selection as multiple albums.

Now wait some hours or days, it depends on your CPU speed, and you're done.

Still too complicated?

In mp3gain, it is even more complicated, because you would need to albumgain every single album *seperately*. In fb2k, you can set it to do this automatically for you.

Unless you just want to TRACKGAIN your files. Then all you need to do is select all files, and choose "scan per-file trackgain". However, then you will not be able to make use of albumgain.

If you don't know what trackgain and albumgain means, then you may want to read up how replaygain works, first (by the way, this would be the same case with mp3gain, because mp3gain IS a method of replaygain).

- Lyx

Thank you very much for this answer, I am a newbie in Vorbis and Foobar too. I have used MP3 recently. I will try it, however, i cannot do any mistake, tags can be deleted whenever. Petr.

I'm a newbie to replauygain and still a little confused. I normally don't use it. But if I have a special Foobar playlist set up for, say, a party, and I want to replaygain *just* that playlist (that is, make the levels of the playlist tracks consistent with reference to each other, *not* to the albums from which they came), I select the whole playlist, then apply 'per track' replaygain?

Short answer: yes

Note that if the tracks already have replaygain information from being scanned previously, all you need to do is configure the replaygain settings in Preferences -> Playback accordingly.

I could be wrong, but I don't think this is true. I recently Album-gained a bunch of my music in mp3gain (using the GUI) and it recognized album tags and applied seperate gain for seperate albums.

ss.

using mp3gain 1.3.2, all songs in one folder are considered one album. I can't find where that's documented, though.

Still figuring out all this fb2k stuff, so...

Replaygain (by default) is going to look at my album *TAGS* (as in id3v2 or other), not my album names in either my filenames or directory structure?

I see the codes above (%album%, etc.), but I'm not sure if these work with tags, filenames, directory structures, or what.

I ask this because the main reason I'm investigating using fb2k is Replaygain (although damn! that masstagger has been awesome!) and I'm still wrestling over a directory structure and filenaming scheme that I like.

So IF replaygain looks at tags, then one big folder like music\artist-album-01-title.mp3 should work the same as seperate folders as in music\artist\album\01-title.mp3. Am I on the right track here? Overlooking anything?

[edit]
Let me add I want everything replaygained by the default "album".

Provided that everything is tagged properly with the correct album ID tags. Yes.

Foobar only looks at the Album tag. So if its correct for all your tracks then you're golden to just add them all to foobar and Replay Gain as Multiple Albums.

If you're in doubt, just try it. Replaygain is fully reversable, so you won't harm anything. Perform the Multiple Album Replay Gain on a few albums and then check the tags to see if its giving different AlbumGains to different albums.

ss.

Not necessarily. Unless you set the album grouping pattern to %album% %artist% (in the preferences), replaygain will count all albums with the same name as one album. So your John Denver "Greatest Hits" album will be considered the same as your Metallica "Greatest Hits" album.