I hope this is in the right forum. Anyways I used to use mp3gain with my mp3's with good results. I recently switched to ogg vorbis q4 and since there is no alternative to mp3gain i have resorted to using replaygain. I don't think it really matters that i'm using rockbox but i figured i would throw that out there. There's an option in the replaygain settings to boost the gain or "preamp" up to 12db which i've done assuming that the prevent clipping option which is also enabled, would prevent any of the files from clipping. I noticed however that in the peak meter it shows that some of my songs are still clipping. Is this a matter of the clipping not occurring long enough for the prevent clipping option to kick in? The files that do show clipping only clip at peak sometimes. If I lower the preamp level I notice that the clipping goes away but so does the overall volume. If I'm going about this the wrong way, what would be the best way of making sure that all of my songs are as loud as they can be, without clipping (a feature in mp3gain which I loved). Thanks for your time

Does the peak meter in Rockbox show values greater than full scale then?

If it only shows full scale, that doesn't mean it's clipping only that it's somewhere in the top band. Actually peaking at +32767 or -32768 (16-bit full scale sample values) doesn't necessarily mean it's clipping. It could have been perfectly normalised to the maximum volume before clipping would occur.

If you really want louder music than the ReplayGain defaults, you'd be better to run a dynamics compressor on the WAV before encoding to Vorbis. You'll affect the sound quality, of course.

I think I've read that iPods limit your volume control so you can't damage your hearing using the supplied earbuds even with the most horribly loud-mastered modern CDs (which then means sensibly mastered CDs can't be made very loud on average), but there is an over-ride available if you accept a disclaimer of liability or something. Might have read that on Wikipedia or something.