Hi

I'm using MP3Gain to change all my albums to 89dB. Does anyone know how I can use the 'Album Analysis' and 'Album Gain' feature to treat two albums as the same one?

For example, I have a double album split into two folders. MP3Gain wants to adjust one folder by 7.5dB and the other by 6dB. I'd rather all the songs in both folders stay the same relative volume.

I realise I could move the songs into one folder just for the purposes of running MP3Gain, but is there an easy option somewhere I'm missing?

Galilee

Nope. I think you answered your own question ...or so is what I would do

You don't have to place them in the same folder, you can get the same volume simply by doing one folder at a time, you would just have to adjust the Target "Normal" Volume gain from 89.0 on one of them to match the other. So in other words you'd just adjust the Target "Normal" Volume gain to either 87.5 or 90.5 on one of the folders.
I don't know if it's a minus or positive gain since you didn't say thus the reason for listing 87.5 and 90.5.

foobar2000 can do this.
"Scan as single album", then "apply abum Replaygain to MP3 data".
Results are bit identical to MP3Gain's one.

Good idea, but rather than arbitrarily choosing one half of the album to match the other, I'd like 'Album Analysis' to look at the album as a whole and find its average volume.

Thanks for the replies, everyone. It's not really a big deal to stick everything in one folder so I won't worry about it too much!

Yes, it should be quite easy with MP3Gain.

1. Click "Add Folder", select Folder #1 and click "Open". Files will appear in the Filelist window.

2. Again click "Add Folder", select Folder #2 and click "Open". Files will be added in the Filelist window.

3. Select all files, click "Album Analysis" and apply Album Gain to the selected files.

MP3Gain will calculate and apply only one album gain value to all files in the selection. Hence they will keep their relative volume.

Cheers!

If that works, then great!

Can't actually test it now, cos I've already MP3Gained all my albums to the same volume (the longwinded swapping folders way) ... but thanks!

If you want to test it, you can ... Remember that changes made by MP3Gain are reversible !

You might do the following:
Select 2 folders you want to perform this test with. Add both to the Filelist as described in my previous post.
Select all files, rightclick and do "Undo Gain Changes".
Now you will see the original values for track volume and some weird values for album volume and album gain.
Next step is to remove these values by rightclicking and selecting "Remove Tags From Files". Then click the "Clear All" button to clear the Filelist window.

Now follow the steps as I described and see if it works for you.
If it's not what you expected then remember this test is reversible too

Cheers!

Just tested it ... and I'm afraid it doesn't work. It still treats seperate folders as seperate albums.

Thanks for suggesting it though - it seemed logical!

The way it works is probably better in the long run anyway - the simple interface and options means that it's easy to get started with and you can't make any mistakes.

You are right about this. My bad. The steps I pointed out in my post will not treat 2 different folders as 1 album.
When I first tried it seemed to work fine. Probably I picked an album of which the 2 discs match well. But after a few more tests it appeared that MP3Gain will apply Album Gain to the selection per folder and not to the selection as a whole.

Sorry!

I hope someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I solved this by switching from "Album Gain" to "Constant Gain" and then just choosing how much quieter/louder to make everything. Any good?

Raphalge

Is this with 0.9.x? I can't find "apply abum Replaygain to MP3 data" on 0.8.3...

Sergio

Yes, this is new feature introduced by 0.9.