Slashdot Mirror

Objective comparison of the loudness: It's called ReplayGain. And it works very well for making all your music library's songs the same relative volume so you don't have to ever touch the volume a 2nd time when shuffling every song you have. No reason it couldn't be used to solve this problem. This is an incredibly simple problem to solve. Enforce ReplayGain processing, done. http://www.replaygain.org/

How does MP3 not handle gapless playback by design? I thought that was up to the software. I've seen many things that will play MP3s with no gaps (mostly PC software), whereas my car stereo doesn't handle it. But i have seen head units that do support gapless playback.

Please note that i'm not arguing, just looking for clarification.

Also, i thought that Replaygain uses ID3v2?

Do they have gapless playback and ReplayGain support yet?

1. replaygain
2. proper gapless playback support
3. A scripted language based system to for determining how the player outputs/reads:
   1. tags
   2. filenames
   3. on-screen displays / title bars / etc
   4. the actual main player window
4. support for embedding cue files in id tags (rip album as a single mp3/ogg/whatever, but it appears as a set of tracks in the player)
5. playing albums from within rar/zip files (another way of doing the above, some benefits/drawbacks by comparision)

Have you tried using Replay Gain? It finds the psychoacoustic level of the music and calculates an appropriate gain correction. Replay gain is supported by foobar2000. MP3Gain is a tool that computes the replay gain for a track and changes the overall gain of the file.

To the casual listener probably not, Winamp is still much "sleeker" graphically. Of course music player should be more about the sound (Tell that to cell phone companies). That's where foobar comes in, although its not open source, you basically know how the entire "signal path" goes from the music file out to whereever you go. You can't really say the same thing for any other players (well you can tell, but it's much more difficult). For example, bet you didn't know most mp3 *clips*, it's just how mp3s encoding do (some samples will go beyond the range of the bitstream "wav" output, thus clip). Foobar lets user deal with the (hard) clipping, either through limiter (soft clips) or something like Replaygain. Another thing is the common sample rate conversion (44.1k->48k) problem with bad resamplers from AC97 soundcards (AC97 does everything is 48k, most music [CDs] are 44.1k), custom SRC was one of the first things in foobar. They also got things like kernel streaming (as oppose to DirectSound) if your a stickler on bitwise perfect output. Of course now it's grown into so much more. Most of these stuff most users won't care, or won't know enough to care, but the point is, foobar lets you control the signal path. Any critical listener would tell you the cleanest signal path is the best you can hope for, unless your equipment has known flaws which need major fixups. Check out hydrogenaudio's forum it's hosted on, these guys are major hardcore audio geeks (the "technical, scientific audiophiles").

for me. Once I tried foobar2000 there was no going back.

Features
* Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player
* Audio formats supported "out-of-the-box": WAV, AIFF, VOC, AU, SND, Ogg Vorbis, MPC, MP2, MP3, MPEG-4 AAC
* Audio formats supported through official addons: FLAC, OggFLAC, Monkey's Audio, WavPack, Speex, CDDA, TFMX, SPC, various MOD types; extraction on-the-fly from RAR, 7-ZIP & ZIP archives
* Full Unicode support on Windows NT
* ReplayGain support
* Low memory footprint, efficient handling of really large playlists
* Advanced file info processing capabilities (generic file info box and masstagger)
* Highly customizable playlist display
* Customizable keyboard shortcuts
* Most of standard components are opensourced under BSD license (source included with the SDK)

If you've ever tried writing a plugin for Winamp you'll fall in love with the fb2k SDK, its like heaven compared to the other player. ;-)

• ReplayGain for MP3s
• ReplayGain for Ogg Vorbis files

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

• ReplayGain for MP3s
• ReplayGain for Ogg Vorbis files

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

"It shreds the iPod in every way."

Hogwash. The The iHP-120 has some nice features, but like all MP3 players, it suffers from some disadvantages, such as:

- Mediocre button layout... no scroll wheel
- Edges not as curved as other players; not as comfortable to hold or pocket
- Mediocre menuing system
- Long startup time if using the DB to organize instead of sorting by directories
- Limited shuffling abilites (especially if organizing by directories)

Additionally, the iPod supports replaygain while the iHP does not does. Also, the iHP doesn't do gapless playback, FLAC, or ethernet (the Karma has all those things, and the Karma will be getting replaygain soon).

I'm not familiar with the state of MP3 tools which support ReplayGain, but I know that Gian-Carlo Pascutto just wrote a tool to add ReplayGain information to Ogg Vorbis files. There is an XMMS support in CVS which uses the information, and I just got done adding support for ReplayGain to ogg123 (it will be about a week before it goes into the xiph.org CVS pending the approval of some other changes). Winamp also supports ReplayGain using Peter's Vorbis plugin

There's a batch Ogg replaygain tool at: http://sjeng.org/ftp/vorbis/

ReplayGain tself is explained at: http://www.replaygain.org

The latest XMMS plugin already supports replaygain (as does latest Ogg123), and it should be in the Winamp plugin soon if not already. Right now it's up to individual apps to support ReplayGain, but we're deciding on an easier way to encourage/include support with core Ogg.

Monty