@skinjob wrote:
Not sure about Media Jukebox, but most of the big players support replaygain these days. Winamp has had it for years.
This is a good point. There is much more than just Media Monkey etc which do replay gain. I am wondering whether Sansa has tested compatability with their implementation of Replaygain on the Fuze, because I am having extremely unreliable results.
I have 60GB+ of MP3’s created personally by myself from my original CD collection. All MP3s have been created over the past 8 years using the same process, but with just different versions of the programs (usually the version currently recommended in the Wiki of Hydrogenaudio.org):
Exact Audio Copy to extract the CD
LAME to encode the WAV (using -V2 - -vbrnew, and whatever it was before that, and obviously with 3.98 no longer needing the vbrnew)
MP3Gain to ‘analyse’ the album info only (so it writes the APE v2 tags, but not modify the MP3 frames)
Winamp to calculate the Replaygain and store in the ID3 tags
MP3Tag to do all the tagging.
The reason I do both MP3Gain and Winamp for the replaygain is because I’ve been using replaygain for so long that at one point in time some of my devices would only read the info from ID3, and others would only read it from APEv2.
I have confirmed the MP3s and their Replaygain functionality is working correctly in Winamp, Foobar2000, XBMC (on both original Xbox and PC) and on my iRiver iHP140 with Rockbox firmware, and I can also visibly read the values within the tags in all of those (except XBMC) and obviously in MP3Tag and other advanced tag editors etc.
The point is, the Sana Fuze is not reading or displaying the Replaygain tags on most albums. Going to the track info on most of my albums does not show any replaygain information, even though I can confirm the information is there (as per above).
Then in the case where it does, and I have it set to ‘song’ mode, it isn’t adjusting from track to track. For example, After Forever’s “Invisible Circles” album has a very quiet intro song with a track gain value of -46.64dB. The song builds to a crescendo at the end and transitions immediately into the next song (apart from the annoying gap due to the lack of gapless playback on the Fuze). The next song’s track gain value is -7.5dB. Yet there is no difference in the volume of the crescendo at the end of the first song or start of the 2nd song, which demonstrates that the Fuze is not utilising the replaygain values. I wish I could use a more common album as my example, but the Fuze is just that unreliable that I’ve only found the values in 3 albums of the 100 or so I have loaded on there.
It doesn’t make any difference if the songs are loaded on the 4GB internal memory, or the 16GB Sansa MicroSD card.
Has anyone else who had an existing MP3 collection with replaygain values had any success? (apart from the people who have used MP3Gain to modify the MP3 frames, therefore not needing replaygain support in the player anyway).
