Re: Replaygain, alternatives to Easymp3gain-gtk/-qt.
On 10/4/2016 12:19 AM, Seeker wrote:
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.
Replaygain: The adventure game.
Threw a few albums into a playlist, 754 tracks, some with replaygain
tags some without. For age of recording, genre, style, etc... a good
selection, but I don't have a list of what tracks in my collection are
the more quiet tracks, so I don't think any tracks in the playlist are
in that extreme quiet end of the spectrum.
Out of the stuff in the playlist thought the Robert Johnson stuff might
be in that extreme quiet side. It is on the low side compared to a lot
of post 2k music. Judas Priest - Redeemer of Souls got an album gain
value of -9.56dB, Robert Johnson - The Last of the Great Blues Singers
got an album gain value of -0.78dB. A significant difference without
replaygain, but not the extreme difference that annoys me.
In Vanilla Music I set the 'replaygain pre-amp' setting to +3, -2 for
the stuff without replaygain tags.
For the tracks in the playlist, that works pretty well. I bit the bullet
and added the replaygain tags to the rest of the stuff, except WMA files
since there is no support there.
A few things in the playlist are in WMA format, but most is in other
formats so less of a test in the difference between replaygain tagged
versus non-tagged after adding the replaygain to the remaining stuff.
Also changed the replaygain pre-amp setting to zero because of concern
about negative affect on the quiet stuff.
Listening this way for a while, things still seem pretty good.
I did find out I have more stuff in WMA format than I thought, but it
will probably still take some months on random play to really get a feel
for how that factors in over the long haul.
Looking at Ex Falso in more depth, it does use gstreamer to do the
replaygain stuff so if you use that there is no need to load anything
from outside the Debian archives to handle mp3 and m4a files.
Ex Falso sets replaygain peak tags and gain tags for track and album,
the replaygain tool in Soundkonverter and easymp3gain-gtk also seem to
do that when using easymp3gain or aacgain. Some of the other front ends
and aacgain from the command line default to a different method, which
modifies the volume a different way then has smaller values for the gain
tag, with an undo tag.
I have not noticed in my collection where this other tactic was used for
an m4a file, so the volume adjustment with the undo tag may be only for
mp3, or it may be that I didn't have many m4a files back in the
2007-2008 time frame when I messed with the replaygain stuff before.
Now that I have the replaygain done for the files on the phone and I am
getting into my re-tagging effort for the files on my computer I am
seeing some of the mp3 files have this undo information when I load the
files into Musicbrainz Picard, but Picard doesn't show the replaygain
information for m4a files. I have also been checking one or two files in
each album folder with mediainfo because it seems the undo stuff will
sometimes show in both sometimes only in Picard and sometimes only in
mediainfo.
Might not be necessary to undo the change and recalculate the gain, but
I want things to be consistent. The secondary reason, if something
happens to the tags when everything is in the tags, you just recalculate
and save the information again. If the volume is adjusted in the file
and undo information kept in a tag and something happens to the undo
tag, then the change becomes permanent.
The first batch of files I ran into with the undo tag I made a copy of
the files so I could play around with the different tools, aacgain does
have the option to use id3 tags to store the replaygain information, but
Ex Falso looks to be doing the tag a little differently so aacgain and
by extension the frontends that use it don't get rid of the tag.
To do this stuff I am normally browsing my music directories in PCManFM
and using the open with feature to open the files in Picard, mediainfo
or Ex Falso and it's just as easy to click the tools menu and open a
terminal window, so the method I settled in on for dealing with the
situation is....
Open a terminal window and use aacgain to undo, then get rid of the
tags, then check the tags to make sure it only shows the file names.
aacgain -u
aacgain -s d
aacgain -s c
Then use the back button in PCManFM, right click the folder with the
files and open with Ex Falso, remove the remaining replaygain tags, then
have Ex Falso recalculate the gain and save.
Later, Seeker
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