Are there any downsides to letting MP3Gain write the Ape tag for the volume information, or is it better to not let it write them?

Of course you don't want a Ape tag written and have it write to the id3v2 you can't undo it later.

Any input would be greatly appreciated, I'm not sure I care to have all my mp3s written with ape tags, not sure if it can cause any issues or not, etc...

THANKS

I can't say for sure, but probably you can delete Ape tags in mp3s with the Mp3 Extensions (for the Windows Explorer) by Michael Mutschler. Though he would stop the development already in 2000, he defacto continued...
The latest version (v3.4.23, January 2004) is available here:
http://www.mutschler.de/mp3ext/MP3ext.html

All I know is if you use mp3tag as an example and delete the Ape tags you loose the volume settings that MP3Gain makes because MP3Gain writes those in Ape, not sure the MP3 Extensions will destroy this also.

The other way as I mentioned is that you set MP3Gain to not write the tag, this of course can't be undone and doesn't use Ape.

So you're talking about MP3ext34b23.exe ?

THANKS

P.S. I just checked with Mp3 Extensions and don't see any Ape tags that MP3Gain made to edit or remove. Also dbpoweramp shows you the tags MPGain made that you can remove, but again remove them and you loose the volume settings.

Anyone have any thought here with MP3Gain by default writting the Ape tags?

THANKS

My thought would be not to write APE tags to MP3 files.

Why do I get the feeling like no one around here uses MP3Gain? LOL...

MP3Gain is a volume normalizer, by default it writes the volume info into a Ape tag, this can then be undone.

However if you don't want to have MP3Gain write the Ape tag to store the volume info, you can use it to be stored into the id3v2 tag, however if you go this route you can't undo it.

Now this is why I've been asking all this, because I've read that having MP3Gain make a volume normalization can cause degradation to the mp3s, all though rare, and if this happens you can simply undo it, that is if you let it write it in the Ape tag.

But then I'm wondering if having simply the Ape tag in an MP3 if players are going to have a problem with it, and the last thing is that the latest version of MP3Gain tags realplay gain into the Ape tag as welll, I think for the sake of foobar...

Anyhow this is where I'm at wondering all of this, or not even bothering with MP3Gain all together...

Anyone else?

THANKS

Lots of people here use MP3Gain and have for several years. The thing is none of us really care that undo information is stored as APE tags.

If you're concerned about hardware problems, try it and find out rather than living in a state of fear. Speaking of, where are you reading that MP3Gain causes noticeable degradation in real-life mp3 files? I put it this way as not to invite theoretical problems which don't actually occur in practice.

So undo information stored as Ape tags is ok, shouldn't be a problem?

No fear here, just wanted to know if anyone knew anything was all.

I was just surfing Google where I read some mention of MP3Gain and possible degradation, but I personally don't know if it's true or not.

THANKS

Undo information stored as Ape tags is ok. It shouldn't be a problem.

mp3gain's writing replaygain tags in apev2 tags is fine. However, it would be nice to have the option to write (and read) replaygain tags in id3v2.
I use foobar2000 to scan files and calculate replaygain values, and just write the replaygain tags in id3v2. fb2k's functionality for replaygain is fine, but I would prefer mp3gain IF it could write tags in id3v2 format.

I thought it could write to id3v2, guess I was looking at something else thinking it could, oh well...

1.2.5 is still the current stable version, and that would only write Ape tags back when I had it installed
There is a beta 1.3.4 but it looks like the difference is that it adds Unicode support (and is still very much in beta, and not recommended)

edit: My guess as to why Mp3gain doesn't support id3v2 tagging as an alternative to Ape tagging: if Mp3gain simply uses Ape tags, it doesn't need to muck around in all of the complex ins and outs of id3v2.3 vs 2.4, recognizing non-standard tags and writing them back correctly, and embedded images. There's a lot of work that needs to go in to make a program play well with id3v2.

Thanks

I did some tests with the Mp3Tag program for somebody. In the middle of that i remembered this thread, and included files treated with Mp3Gain. So here are the results:

Mp3Tag recognizes ApeV2 tags, but can't show them. However, it is able to delete such tags! I did so, and verified the resultat with a hex editor.
After that i played all three versions of my test file:
1. mp3 (pure)
2. mp3 (Mp3Gain with ApeV2 tags)
3. mp3 (Mp3Gain without ApeV2 tags)

Conclusion:
You don't loose the volume settings if ApeV2 tags are removed! (Of course, the backup data are lost, so you can't undo Mp3Gain's modifications.)
Mp3Gain obviously stores volume informations "within", not (only) as tags at the end of a file. This is not an unexpected result for me, however, because my very legacy standard mp3-player (Winplay3 from FhG) never had problems to correctly reproduce Mp3Gain treated files.

P.S.
My tests were restricted to Mp3Tag v2.39 because of system requirements. The newest version (2.42) has extended functions concerning some audio formats. The prog is freeware.
Link: http://www.mp3tag.de (german/english)

That's wrong. Mp3tag fully supports APEv2 for MP3 (even with cover-art support) as long as you enable reading and writing of APEv2 at 'Options > Tags > Mpeg'.

Thanks, Florian.
It's always profitable to talk with the originator.
Though noticing a contradiction, i was simply too blind for resolving that ...