I ripped "Jethro Tull - Aqualung" in EAC, and it went fine, except that the peak volumes were between 40 and 70%. When I encoded it in MPC Batch Encoder at level 6, it sounded fine, but was REALLY soft compared to the rest of the music I had.

I put it through Replay Gain, --auto, but instead of raising the volume, it lowered it even more! This did not make sense to me!
So I reset the values and just added a 10dB gain to every song, and now it sounds beautiful. How does it do this without affecting the quality of the song?

I like the ability to reset the values - much nicer than MP3Gain.

Thanks in advance.

If you listen to mpc with WinAmp, check the replaygain and headroom options in the plugin configuration.
The headroom setting K-14 should make the loudness roughly the same as with mp3.

Edit: Ah, yeah, to answer the question: musepack replaygain is perfectly lossless and reversible, because it only modifies the special replaygain tags in the header of the file.
mp3gain modifies the "global gain" values directly in the bitsream of every mp3 frame.

Louder doesn't necessarily mean better quality, its a matter of turning up the volume on the speakers.

I realize this - I retract my statement - there was major clipping with a 10dB increase.

What I'm wondering is why that CD had such a low peak volume than another one - such as Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick. Similar sound, similar recording date, completely different peak volume. I know it's not as open and closed as that, but they, you gotta start somewhere =)

Well, first of all, peak volume doesn't represent the loudness, in general. It's the root-mean-square (rms) average that matters (and that's what replaygain is based on).

But it's not clear what is the problem in your case.
Are you saying that those two Jethro Tulls discs have similar loudness when played on a cd-player,
but Aqualung sounds much quieter/softer than Thick as a Brick when encoded to mpc?
That would be really odd.


Btw, I happen to have the Aqualung. The peaks are between 90%-100%, and replaygain yields only -1.06 dB album gain.
The difference from your Aqualung may be because of different disc edition/re-mastering etc