Hi everyone, I've just been using Foobar2000 v0.31c to replaygain my oggs and I noticed something strange. Once I have replaygained my oggs they play less loud than before. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the whole point of replaygain is to increase the volume of all the tracks to the max volume, instead of using normalising in the encoding. This error also occurs in WA2 with in_vorbis v1.2.9, the songs play quieter when replaygain is selected in either track or album mode (possible bug in shared code?). Unchecking the use 6db hard limiter has no effect on the replaygain. Here is the info from my ogg anyway, if it helps:

replaygain_track_gain = -6.0600 dB
replaygain_track_peak = 1.0145
replaygain_album_gain = -5.6500 dB
replaygain_album_peak = 1.0166

Also, using vorbisgain.exe from RareWares produces the same replaygain values.

not a bug, check http://replaygain.hydrogenaudio.org/faq_quiet.html

edit:

replaygain is about equalizing the perceived loudness, not about levels.

Ahh, I see now. Thanks for the link. So to increase the volume to the max I have to "simply increase the Pre-amp gain, and enable hard-limiting". A bit of a strange way to do things.

So replay gain actually is a "sound un-compressor" for lack of a better word, or makes compressed tracks more dynamic.

I guess what I would like is for any players to automatically max out the Pre-amp gain for replaygained files and not for those that don't. WA2's in_vorbis is close to being ideal as it has a switch that applies preamp only if RG info is available, but still have to manually max it out.

Hopefully a RG Pre-amp will be implemented into newer versions of Foobar2000. As currently it only has a global Pre-amp.

Thanks PP for the great player, keep up the good work. Your efforts are apreciated.

nope, thats exacly what replaygain is trying to avoid by decreasing levels. (level != perceived loudness)


the opposite, when rg is active all the files that dont have the rg tags should be lowered to the lower reference volume (automagicaly by the player) afaik.

replaygain is to match volume levels between several songs, so that you don't have your stuff turned up for a quiet song and then get your ears blasted to death when the next song comes on, which is much louder than the last song. matching all your songs volumes generally turns things down, since you can't turn everything up without some of them hitting the limit and clipping. you can, however, turn things down without much problem and generally that's what happens with today's music, lots of which is mastered at a pretty high average volume compared to recordings from a decade ago

... and for listening at your favourite volume use this big knob in front of (pre)amplifier that says "volume"

Replaygain's destination is to enforce some "loudness standard" on your audio files (usefull and important standard that music industry forgot to lay down) and it (nor any other digital processing feature) shouldn't be used as "amplifier".

yeah turn up the volume knob (not preamp)
all songs will be "equally" loud, so you dont have to worry that the next track will blow your ears away
I love it

I understand what everyone is saying, but if you then decide to use a program that doesn't use replaygain you get your ears blow off. Unless you use the method I quoted from the replaygain website linked above.