Thanks Phil, yes, I think we're on the same wavelength. I too had considered changing the tag gains to 0dB, but haven't yet got round to testing it (didn't have a good tag editor for a start - most don't seem to allow gain editing!). SMST's suggestion to kill the gain tags is even better. I eventually found a version of foobar2k that supposedly works under Win2k, and will try to install/test it over the next few days.
Y360, my virtual memory was/is set at a little over 6GB; should be heaps. Robin, I'm running lots of other stuff on my music 'server' - it's my 'work' PC (I work from home) running Outlook, Skype, ZoneAlarm, POW, and various other applications (IE6, Word, programming environments/compilers, etc) as the need arises. But I don't run any anti-virus/spyware background tasks (they slow the PC too much). ZoneAlarm would be the main background cycle-stealer, with POW coming into play when I run IE6. SC is started automatically at boot-up from the Startup directory. I did notice that if I stop SS/SC before I reboot, the startup 'thrashing' time is much reduced, but I'll have to do some more tests to quantify this (I can't right now; I'm in the middle of a big processing job). I found this disappointing too - I would have thought SC would shut down correctly when commanded by Windows, without me having to manually intervene. To me, anything in the System Tray can be ignored during shutdown - only programs in the Taskbar should be first closed (especially Outlook, which suffers from the same problem if not closed before rebooting - probably validating its .pst file which wasn't properly closed). Erland, my apologies! I probably looked late at night and just looked at the main (central) page content. I've downloaded the 2 plugins now, and will read the wikis when I have more time, to decide whether to instal and try your additions. This is absolutely no reflection on Erland and the many other people who have contributed to the Slim product, but I tend to shy away from products that need lots of 'add-ons' to make them work properly. I guess I've been 'conditioned' by the many commercial products that you just install and they do (more or less) what they're supposed to, so I'm not used to products that have grown like topsy from a band of enthusiasts, and are still (effectively) in development. But we're slowly getting there! SMST, you've made some great suggestions about special tags for surround tracks - I heartily agree. Indeed, I'd like to see it go one step further and include a new gain tag (perhaps call it 'SurrGain'?) that is NOT used by replay gain players, but is broadcast (when it's present) along with the file header at the start of each track. [I know nothing about how SC 'broadcasts' the music stream via Wi-Fi, but I'm assuming there's some sort of 'header' sent at the start of each track, with the tag info etc). With such a SurrGain tag, I could (when I learn how to program network-aware DOS applications) reprogram my DOS6.22 touch PC that controls most functions of my (overly complex) surround system. It could then adjust my system's 'pre-volume' so that the DTS tracks sounded the same loudness as the replay-gain-adjusted stereo tracks. Of course I would need to empirically determine the values and tag the SurrGain for each album, but with only a few dozen DTS CDs, that wouldn't be arduous. Daniel -- DanielTheGreat ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DanielTheGreat's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13031 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=44457 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss