December 6, 2004

6:37 PM

WinAmpFilter: The constant variation between too loud and too quiet is killing me. Which WinAmp plug-ins for volume normalization do you recommend? Yes, I know iTunes does it well, but iTunes doesn't play nice when I have a couple of other programs open.
posted by LouMac to (7 comments total)

ReplayGain. Rather than just peak level normalization, it uses multi-band analysis to measure percieved loudness to set amplification/attenuation levels. There's at least one ReplayGain plugin for Winamp, but if you're dealing with just MP3s, MP3Gain performs Replaygain normalization directly on MP3 files, losslessly.
posted by zsazsa at 7:14 PM on December 6, 2004

ReplayGain seconded. It is lossless rather than modifying the content of the files. Several formats support it as well as several players.

I'm using ReplayGain on my FLAC files which I play back through WinAmp. It is wonderful to not be constantly reaching for the volume.
posted by kreinsch at 8:03 PM on December 6, 2004

Sweet. Thanks for asking this question. This has bugged me for a while as well. I didn't know there was actually a fix to it.

On preview: is MP3Gain better if I'm using only mp3s? (This seems to be what zsazsa is implying.)
posted by BradNelson at 8:05 PM on December 6, 2004

BradNelson, I haven't tried MP3Gain since my library is almost exclusively FLAC.

The ReplayGain idea is that you put the data in meta-tags and don't tinker with the content of the audio at all - but a ReplayGain compatible player or plug-in is needed for playback.
I believe that MP3Gain instead modifies the actual audio so that your player doesn't need to support anything extra. I think that I saw somewhere in the hydrogenaudio forums that you can force MP3Gain to do metatagging instead.

You can certainly do tag-based ReplayGain in MP3, FLAC, Ogg and probably others. For WAV there is something called WaveGain, but it (again) seems to directly modify the audio.

Back to your question - if your library is exclusively MP3, then MP3Gain is probably the way to go.
posted by kreinsch at 8:31 PM on December 6, 2004

Thanks, all...I will give ReplayGain a try, seeing as my library is mostly .mp3, but has a few (50-100) AAC iTunes tracks.
posted by LouMac at 6:42 AM on December 7, 2004

As a point of clarification, the ReplayGain plugin is for WinAmp 2. Will it also work for WinAmp 5?
posted by LouMac at 7:34 AM on December 7, 2004

My understanding is that Winamp 5 supports all the plugins that work for Winamp 2, so you should be fine installing the ReplayGain.
(I have to grab this too when I get back to my home computer . . . classical piano and modern pop/rock do not play well together.)
posted by jenovus at 10:34 AM on December 7, 2004