Hi,

I have a bunch of CD's I want to convert to Ogg and put on an iAudio X5. I also have a lot of FLACs I want to convert to Ogg's, too.

I really *hate* when volume differences make one have to constantly tweak the knob, and based upon my affinity for "shuffle" playing, this could result in a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome!

Using the rough breakdown of 75% of what I want to encode is on CD, and the remaining 25% is in FLAC form, what is the best way to apply a uniform loudness tweak to ALL of these files before I drag them onto the X5?

1. I've searched the archive, so I've read that Foobar2000 might be an answer. Is it really as simple as batch processing the files AFTER they've (both WAV and FLAC) been converted to Oggs in Foobar (using Replaygain) to achieve this effect?

2. Would adding Replaygain to a lossy file corrupt the file more?

3. Does anyone else know if the iAudio X5 supports Replaygain "out of the box" or would I need to install Rockbox on it?

4. I have a program called Volume Balancer that can be used on WAV files -- is it better to do this kind of balancing BEFORE converting to Ogg?

Thanks again!!!

Adding ReplayGain after encoding would only help if you installed Rockbox on the X5, since any available ReplayGain scanner just adds the corresponding tags to the Vorbis Comments instead of manipulating the waveform itself. In my knowledge no hardware device, including the X5, natively reads these tags.

An alternative would be the way I sort this problem out by myself. My Trekstor i.Beat organix isn't supported by Rockbox, hence I simply apply ReplayGain in track/radio mode during encoding. Unlike the option mentioned above the scanner actually modifies the waveform while applying the gain this way, making the volume change compatible to any available hardware player. Both foobar2000 and john33's OggDropXPd (download an appropriate SSE build from the linked site) are able to apply this change, the former does so by checking the ReplayGain option in its converter (the one with the warning that this change was irreversible, not the one which scans the files after encoding), OggDropXPd can use the ReplayGain tags of FLAC input files to scale the resulting Vorbis ones. Please note that this way of applying ReplayGain should only be used for files which are meant to be played back by hardware devices since there's no possibility to return to the original values.

I'd recommend you to simply rip your whole CD collection to a FLAC archive with ReplayGain tags being added to their Vorbis Comments, then you can choose to convert these files to Vorbis either by using foobar's converter or OggDropXPd with track/radio ReplayGain being irreversibly applied to them. Foobar's results will be a little more exact, because OggDropXPd uses the losslessly compressed files' ReplayGain tags as a base for the volume manipulation, which slightly differ from the ones of lossy files. My personal observations revealed that this difference usually constitutes a few tenths of a dB, hence it doesn't really matter in practice.

Personally I'd recommend going for Rockbox, since it would allow you to create a Vorbis collection without applying any irreversible volume modifications to it, making it suitable for both PC and X5 playback. Foobar's ReplayGain scanner will do this job quickly and painlessly. If you preferred going for the alternative instead, do so as described above, without having to process the files using the mentioned WAV Volume Balancer first.