Re: Replaygain, alternatives to Easymp3gain-gtk/-qt.
On 9/18/2016 12:34 PM, Seeker wrote:
Initially looked into the replaygain stuff in 2008. Don't remember
what all was available at the time. Remember that I looked into
Sounkoverter and easymp3gain-gtk. More recently have preferred
easymp3gain-qt.
I'm running unstable, investigating why esaymp3gain-gtk/-qt are
showing up in the obsolete software list, it was removed by request.
Aacgain handles MP3 files so that fact that easymp3gain was removed
some time ago is a non-issue, dead upstream, no activity since 2013
on the other hand is a big issue.
Short term I am content to keep the software installed and continue
using it while I investigate alternatives, but there are always the
questions of 'How long do I really want to keep dead software on my
system' and 'How long will the software continue to work'.
So I am wondering what other people are using and what do you like
about it.
One of the things I like about easymp3gain-qt is the always visible
listing of individual tracks that have been added and what track and
album gain has been applied to each track. Having that kind of file
listing is a lesser issue, would like a drag and drop solution.
I'm getting ready to look at qtgain.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/qtgain/
The snapshot makes it look kind of minimalistic as far as information
it displays.
Current process when I get a new CD.
RIP with Soundjuicer, drag and drop from a filemanager to easymp3-qt
to add the replaygain tags, browse into the album directory if not
already there, select the music files and use the file managers 'open
with' function to open in Musicbrainz Picard to pull in more complete
tag information and rename the files to '[track #] [track title].
Musicbrainz Picard does have a plug-in for replaygain, but I was not
real happy with the way it works, seemed a little quirky but some of
that may have been whatever updates were happening in unstable at the
time when I looked at it.
Later, Seeker
The continuing story of radar lo...um... replaygain.
I was going to compare things in my Ubuntu installation, but no aacgain
for Ubuntu, looks like there was a PPA for precise, but nothing for more
recent releases.
Back to Debian. I have aacgain loaded from deb-multimedia.org. Need that
for mp3 and m4a support. The tools that let you specify a path to
mp3gain you can use '/usr/bin/aacgain' so aacgain will get used for mp3.
No support anywhere for wma that I could find, don't know if that is
because of a limitation in tagging or something else.
Wasn't happy with qtgain.
The plugin for Musicbrainz Picard doesn't have an option for aacgain, so
no mp4, that may be a contributing factor as to why I thought it was a
little quirky.
The replaygain tool in Soundkonverter generally works pretty well,
except for m4a at the time I am writing this, it just displays question
marks in the track and album gain columns, so have to check in something
else to make sure that tags were applied in the m4a files.
After reviewing the wiki page again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayGain#Scanners
Noticed Quod Libet/Ex Falso. Ex Falso is a tagger, Quod Libet is a music
player that uses Ex Falso for it's tagging system. Available in Debian.
It looks like Ex Falso is the way I'm going to go.
The replaygain plugin in Ex Falso is disabled by default so you have to
enable it first.
Once enabled you can select some tracks in the song list, right click,
then select replaygain to initiate the scan.
Minor issues with Ex Falso.
It seems to have it's own way of scanning, so even if you select some
WMA files it can calculate a value, and it gives an option to save and
acts like it was successful, but since there is no support for wma, when
you close, then go back to those files again, no replaygain information.
My music is on a different hard drive, in the past I had symlinks, but
prefer not to do that these days. So in the filebrowser in Ex Falso it's
a little clunky to browse to where my music is and didn't see a way to
shorcut it in Ex Falso. Instead I open a filemanager, browse to my music
directory, then use the 'open with' option to open a directory in Ex
Falso. If you use the 'open with' function with a file just do one file,
if you select multiple files and do 'open with', you get multiple Ex
Falso windows.
If you use Quod Libet as your music player, you can use the tagging
feature from inside of Quod Libet and bypass some of those issues.
Ex Falso does save mp3 tags in id3v2.4 format, don't know if that is an
issue if you only use it for replaygain, but could be an issue if you
use it for the other tagging features. Mainly Windows Media Player and
Groove in Windows, or hardware music players, TVs, etc...
I don't have any issues with it on my Android phone. The stereo doesn't
know how to display cyrillic, kanji, etc... when I listen to music over
bluetooth in the car, but that is the same whether the mp3s are tagged
in id3v2.3 or id3v2.4.
I use Vanilla Music on my phone, available from Google Play or F-Droid,
whichever you prefer.
Later, Seeker
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