Recently, I've discovered that two tools I've had for ages - foobar and mp3tag - can be used to transcode FLAC to AAC, and even to convert ReplayGain values to SoundCheck. Just what I want!
Well, almost. Trouble is, to use them properly, I'd have to redo the entire contents of my iPod; and that's going to take a long, long time! So instead, I'm going for something of a botch-job and half-way house: get foobar to generate AAC, but to normalise using the ReplayGain values in the source. There's a tiny snag, however: by default, RG normalisation pegs the peaks at about 89dB, which is quieter than most modern CDs. Foobar allows me to specify a pre-amp level, which I believe I can use to boost the RG-normalised tracks to something closer to the (yes, overcooked) levels of most of the rest. I've read that +6dB is about the limit before clipping is inevitable; true? My brief experiments have suggested that RG +6dB still doesn't keep up. If there's distortion, I can't detect it - but this is an iPod after all :-) Once I've found a pre-amp boost that seems to do the trick, my plan is to redo those tracks that are too quiet at present (for example, stuff that I would like to play in the car); and perhaps to apply it to all new rips/transcodes as well. And this brings me on to SlimServer... though I've been adding ReplayGain tags as I go along, I rarely use RG. This is because a significant chunk of my library is still in WMA, and RG doesn't work for WMA. So if I turn on RG, all is OK until a WMA track shows up in the mix, and then it's usually far too loud. So: is there a way of applying a pre-amp boost to RG'd tracks in SlimServer? And of course, it would have to *only* apply it to those tracks that have RG values (or at least, *not* apply it to WMA files). Alternatively, would there be a way to reduce the playback volume of all WMA tracks (preferably only when RG is being used)? Is this possible? Is it worth considering? -- Brian -- Brian Ritchie ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Brian Ritchie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2319 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=39370 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
