Asking for replaygain support

[gorman]

At least in these "pre-production" builds, it would help enormously if the player showed somewhere what it was doing. Like "RG applied: x, preamp applied: y". I'm having "strange results but I'm not sure what's happening because not all tracks have enormous gains to be applied and it's tough to do testing by ear.

I think there's something not working as it should but the above info would help immensely in testing.

Also, are you limiting the volume changes applied by the values stored in track_peak and album_peak? I'm suspecting it but I'm not sure.

Thanks a lot for looking into this.

PS
At the moment you are not clarifying how the player chooses between track and album gain. If you are doing it the "smart" way, I think it's better to be explicit about it and, maybe, leaving the choice to the user. I say this because while the "smart" thing it's really smart, it's not a "by the book" implementation. It was the result of several feature requests on Squeezebox forums. In case of mixed playlists it's really the only option that makes sense but still... people are special in wanting the one option you are not providing

[daneren2005]

I can add a build which displays the replaygain value applied this evening. I do nothing with the track_peak and album_peak. I just copied the Vanilla Player implementation which only seems to use the track/album replaygain tags. The "smart" change I made is that every song which gets added gets checked to see if we are still playing all songs from a single album. The tags are applied as follows:

1) If we are listening to a single album and album tag is not 0, use album tags.
2) If track tags are 0, then we use album tags.
3) Otherwise use track tags.

This is how the OP made it sound like Squeezebox implements it.

[gorman]

I think you should use album tags if the following track is from the same album. If, for instance, I decide to create a playlist with consecutive tracks from the same album and they are from a gapless album, using track gain because there's songs from other albums down the playlist... would potentially disrupt the listening experience.

Smart gain from Squeezebox is explained here: http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/A ... Adjustment

And thanks, a build that displays the values applied would certainly help in testing it.

I feel you are adding great value to your app by doing this, by the way.

[daneren2005]

"Smart" gain selection uses album gain if successive songs are from the same album or track gain for a mixed playlist

That seems to me like they mean the same thing I did. The problem with only checking the next song is that you lose most of the benefit of normalization. You would end up with parts normalized against a few surrounding songs and other parts normalized against the whole in the scenario you speak of. My understanding is that track gain should be normalizing across everything, so I'm not sure why it would be disruptive there.

PS: Sorry, I forgot to put up a build which display the values last night. I will tonight.

[daneren2005]

Alright, here is a build where is displays the values it used. Format is: Applied volume <volume> +- <replay gain> (<single album>). <volume> is between 0 and 1.0. If you have percentage, times it by 100. <replay gain> is the db value in the tag.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6p72izbk7aaam ... 9.apk?dl=0

[gorman]

Ok, now I can see the logic at work. It makes sense. BUT.

Imagine a situation where you enque two or three albums. Some with gapless transitions. That's when it gets disruptive. Because you would have ttack gain applied to tracks from the same album, with results of various silliness. Think Dark Side of the Moon. The album flows from one track to the other but if you apply track gain... it's disruptive.

Speak to me it's a quiet track, it has positive gain. Then Breathe comes and it has negative gain. If you don't apply album gain you ruin the transition.

[Reith]

Ok, now I can see the logic at work. It makes sense. BUT.

Imagine a situation where you enque two or three albums. Some with gapless transitions. That's when it gets disruptive. Because you would have ttack gain applied to tracks from the same album, with results of various silliness. Think Dark Side of the Moon. The album flows from one track to the other but if you apply track gain... it's disruptive.

Speak to me it's a quiet track, it has positive gain. Then Breathe comes and it has negative gain. If you don't apply album gain you ruin the transition.

So how do you propose he fixes that?

ReplayGain is a complicated topic due to everyone having different listening habits. Personally I never queue up multiple albums at a time.

[gorman]

I simply propose that, as in Squeezeboxes, the user is given the choice to apply Track, Album or "Smart" gain. The latter should be implemented as suggested originally.

Otherwise, even if you do not queue up multiple albums but, let''s say, you are listening to a single album and later enqueue just a single track from a different album, the rest of the original album will be played back applying track gain. Which is plain wrong, I suppose.

[daneren2005]

How about changing it so that instead of looking for everything in the playlist being a single album, I check to see if the current song is one of at least 4 consecutive songs of the same album? If that is the only case you can think of, then it seems like it would be better to use a different approach instead of adding another option like that. To demonstrate:

Album A -> Album tags
Album A -> Album tags
Album A -> Album tags
Album A -> Album tags
Album A -> Album tags
Album A -> Album tags
Album B -> Track tags
Album B -> Track tags
Album C -> Album tags
Album C -> Album tags
Album C -> Album tags
Album C -> Album tags
Album C -> Album tags

[gorman]

That's a good idea for the "smart gain" implementation. But being able to select between album and track gain is part of the standard. "Smart" goes on top of that.

[daneren2005]

Alright, I went ahead and both made it optional and implemented the better detection logic. Here is what is probably the final build before I release this stuff.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6p72izbk7aaam ... 9.apk?dl=0

[gorman]

Cool! I'll try it this afternoon and report back.

[gorman]

Tried. It works.

The icing on the cake would be to add a customizable value for the number of tracks the "smart" option checks ahead.

Great work, by the way.

[daneren2005]

I think I've added enough options just for Replay Gain

If you have an opinion on whether it should be higher or lower, I can definitely change the default since you two are the only ones here with an opinion about the matter.

[loubat]

Really excited to open up DSub and see RG support. Now can somebody please point me to the settings I need to change on the transcoder within Subsonic to get it to work? Thanks!
Or if you just want to post them here, I'm transcoding flacs and mp3s to mp3s.