Replay Gain: A how to informational

Suggestion:

Use Media Monkey and rip CDs to FLAC (or MP3) format and have it automatically analyse the track volume in the process.  Then you wont need to go back and analyze all the tracks later should you decide to use it.

Message Edited by sansafix on 04-10-2009 08:49 AM

I use & prefer Media Jukebox.  Replay Gain will only work with Media Monkey? 

@rickh wrote:
I use & prefer Media Jukebox.  Replay Gain will only work with Media Monkey? 

Not sure about Media Jukebox, but most of the big players support replaygain these days.  Winamp has had it for years.

is media monkey beta ok to use for this process or should I use the older version ?

@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).

@appletree wrote:
I have about 850 songs in my Fuze. Could anyone tell me, how long the process will take time if I analyze all of them by using media monkey?

I’m running just over 1900 through it now and seems to take less than 1 second per song. Your 850 songs should be just over 14 minutes.

@slotmonsta wrote:

 

 

 

Replay Gain implementation for Sansa Fuze

 

 

On the Player:
Once your files have been analyzed you can transfer them to the Fuze Player.
To enable/ disable Replay Gain: select Music Options>Replay Gain.  Select the Mode to be “Song”, “Album”, or “Off”.  The Off setting will not apply any corrections to the volume level regardless of the Replay Gain values found. If Album mode is selected but Album Gain values are not present, Track Gain values will be used if available.

 

If “SONG” is selected, This means each song played is played at the same level correct?

@coreying wrote:

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.

Replay Gain works fine on my Fuze, except for the ‘+’ bug. Maybe you can upload some samples?

@ mmike. “Song” means it will use the track gain values instead of the album gain values. You’d select “Song” normally only if playing mixes and playlists etc. Listening to albums with “Song” selected can give weird results - which is what I should get with my After Forever example. The fact I don’t get a weird result is what indicates an issue with the Fuze in that example.

@ justme - I’m not 100% sure what the ‘+’ bug is, but you could be on to something. For my After Forever example track 1 should have a track gain of +3.36 dB, whereas Track 2 should be (and is displayed on the Fuze as) -7.55 dB. So maybe this is the cause of my issues with the “Song” mode.

I still need to figure out what the issue is with the Fuze not recognising Replaygain in 90% of my albums when every other Replaygain aware device and software I’ve tried works fine.

coreying wrote: 

@ justme - I’m not 100% sure what the ‘+’ bug is, but you could be on to something. For my After Forever example track 1 should have a track gain of +3.36 dB, whereas Track 2 should be (and is displayed on the Fuze as) -7.55 dB. So maybe this is the cause of my issues with the “Song” mode.

Yes, that’s what I was talking about. Please read this.

As for the “Replaygain info not recognised” issue, check your mp3s with Mp3Tag. If it’s APEv2 tag (you use MP3Gain right?), it won’t work with the Fuze.

Message Edited by justme on 04-14-2009 11:06 PM

Thanks for the link justme.

And yes, I’ve checked with MP3Tag. That’s what I’m saying. It can see the replaygain values in the ID3Tag (in addition to the values in the separate APEv2 tag), yet the Fuze is not reading them for all albums. It is only the fuze which is not working correctly. Winamp, Mp3Tag, Rockbox, XBMC, Foobar2000 all work fine with them.

Well, I can’t help you here. Maybe you can do some trial and errors (change encoding, tag version…) to see how it works, or upload some problematic samples?

Well I have exactly the same problem as coreying. Fuze doesn’t recognize RG values for some files (values don’t appear in Track info). And it’s not just one or two tracks, but a lot of them. Usually whole albums. Have checked on MP3Tag as well and everything seems fine, and e.g. foobar2000 can see the values just fine too. Tried rescanning the RG values but it doesn’t help.

I’d really like a fix for this bug because it renders the whole ReplayGain function pretty much useless. I use shuffle 95% of the time for all my songs and every once in a while a song almost explodes my head blasting out at full volume.

Testing with file-per-track FLAC files, the Fuze can read the RG tags - but changing between album and track mode or even the pre-gain makes no audible difference to the output.

With FLAC images with embedded cue sheet, the Fuze does not pick up *any* Replay Gain information from the file.

[edit] Ah, you have to stop the player and start again to get the RG to affect the output - pausing will not change it. [/edit]

Message Edited by NickC on 05-07-2009 01:31 PM

The Fuze applies the replay gain adjustment only when the  track is started.  Settings are not monitored or updated until another track is started or the track is restarted.

Well, I believe I have got something. It appears that if mp3 has v1+v2 tags (doesn’t matter if it is 2.3 or 2.4) then replaygain is not seen by the fuze. But, if the v1 tag is removed (say, in mp3tag), then replaygain is magically here.

So, may be fuze can see replaygain in mp3 if there is _only_ a v2 tag?

Message Edited by borka on 06-04-2009 02:47 AM

Hmm - it could be something like that. Although, for the few MP3 files of mine that the Fuze does recognise RG tags, they do have v1 tags too.

I’m rather disappointed with this RG implementation. This was supposed to be the “big reason to not use rockbox” - and yet it has been very sloppily implemented. Judging by the fact that Sansa have recommended specific software for applying RG to the MP3s, it seems that they haven’t tested compatability with a range of applications.

The fact is, I’ve been using RG now for over 4 years. My MP3s work fine with Rockbox, Winamp, Foobar, XBMC, MP3Tag, and any other program I’ve used over the years with RG support - but not the Fuze. I’m not going to change my 60GB plus of personally encoded MP3s…

Not to worry, this latest firmware incorporated many individual code changes.  I’m sure that the glitches will be worked out in a future firmware release.

This is one advantage of such an active forum!  There’s plenty of feedback from the field.

Bob  :smileyvery-happy:

Well, _if_ there will be future firmware. Let’s hope.

For me replaygain works Ok - that is, if there is id3v1 it sometimes works, sometimes no. But if the id3v1 is removed, it works 100%.

But, the main annoyance now is 2.4 incompatibility - and problems with foobar.

What problems with Foobar?