Hi all.

I recently ran across mp3Gain again, a program I used to use to volume level all of my mp3s. I've run some searches looking for a solid guide, but can't quite seem to get what I need to know. I have several hundred albums, all individually foldered. The old version of mp3Gain used to have an option that was something like "treat each folder as album". That option is not in the new version. Does simply selection "Album Gain" assume that each folder is an album? What I'd like is to select my entire collection and have them volume-leveled, but retain the level balance within each album. How would I do this?

Also, I use ID3-TagIt to do any tag editing. Will that affect the mp3Gain tags in any way, or will it leave them alone?

thanks for the help, and for a great forum!

You could try this on just a couple of albums (e.g. copy (don't MOVE) the folders to a safe location and check that you have a duplicate then test it in this new location without risking your good files). I think it will work, but I don't know if it's using the folder structure or the ID3 tags to tell whether the files belong in one album.

Just so you know, you can now do the same as MP3Gain with foobar2000 v0.9 or above, though I'm not certain whether it provides an Undo tag like MP3Gain does now (I tend to rip lossless and pre-apply Album gain in Foobar2000 when sending the data to LAME, and I don't care about Undo because I always want the music adjusted, plus I might save some bitrate bloat by pre-applying the gain). Also, foobar2000 lets me select a double album and scan it for a single Album Gain and Album Peak figure (all options in the right-click menu). Re-checking the peak figure after encoding might be worthwhile.



Again, I'd say test it on a duplicate file. It can't damage it if you edit the tags before you MP3gain, but any unknown software has the potential to lose the RG tags if they exist already, so it's worth checking. Foobar2000's Properties tabs will reveal all the tags including MP3GAIN_UNDO (right-click one of the tested files and refresh the data if you've opened it in foobar before).

A small test on a couple of albums to look for simple problems should be easier than trawling for documentation in this case.

<http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/index.php>
my copy, v1.2.5, can do both "Track" and "Album".
seems to me i remember loading a complete folder, highlighting a selection of songs and MP3Gain working its magic only on those songs.