swhite58;322549 Wrote: > I've ripped my CDs to FLAC using EAC, including the replaygain tags, for > use with my SB3. I then created mp3 versions using the terrific > flac2mp3.pl script (it took 3 days!), so I could load them into my > Creative Zen portable music player.
Last time I looked at flac2mp3, it didn't preserve the replaygain tags. (Perhaps with good reason, if transcoding might change the levels anyway...?) > However, I don't think the Zen supports replaygain. Does anyone know of > a player that does? Astonishingly, iPods. However, it's not that simple (of course): iPods don't understand replaygain. But there are ways of converting replaygain tags into tags that the iPod *can* understand. Allegedly (see below). > I assume that an alternative is to normalise the mp3 files themselves, > which would involve recoding. Can anyone suggest a reliable method of > doing this? foobar2000 can do this; you can tell it to normalise converted files according to the RG tags in the source file. Alternatively, it can be set to calculate and add RG tags for the generated files. (There doesn't seem to be a way to simply copy the tags; again, this suggests that transcoding might make the original values worthless.) The latter is what I do; then I use an mp3tag add-on to convert the RG (track) tags to iTunesNorm gibberish, in the hope that it might work on my iPod. I must admit I've yet to try it in earnest though, as I've too many old tracks on the iPod that don't have the tags set, or have them set to bizarre values so that gain management goes horribly, painfully wrong. One day I'll do it all again, but not today, and not tomorrow... For the Zen, you'll have to think hard about whether you really do want normalisation. If you choose to normalise using track gain, then there's a risk that some quiet tracks will sound too loud, especially if you listen to them as part of their original album. Of course, you could think of it as trading off sometimes having to turn them up against sometimes having to turn them down. In my case, I do a lot of portable listening in a noisy environment (called a "car"), so I'd prefer to normalise by track gain; that way I don't have to keep fiddling with the volume whilst driving. (Well, at least, that's the theory - see above...) -- 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=50190 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
