Good questions. First, yes in my opinion, all tracks should have tags containing album and track RG values (whether one uses them or not currently).
I use "smart gain" in SB, as I believe that when playing a complete album I want to preserve the relative loudness among songs on the album. And of course, with random tracks it will use track gain (which to me seems appropriate). With regard to the "audiophile" issue related to always using album gain, I'd argue that once you are not listening to the entire album in the artist's (or producer's) desired order, all bets are off anyhow (Dark Side of the Moon anyone?). As an aside, I'd assume "audiophiles" would prefer not to have any volume adjustments made in the digital playback chain so wouldn't use album or track gain. With regard to the only real debatable question I see (for me) in your question is the track gain for random play of an album. I guess in my case I never actually do this. I listen to an album (in track order) or I listen to random songs, which are always from multiple albums (even if from the same artist). This said, I tend to agree that once you go to random, track gain is the default choice. One question though, and I don't know the answer. Does smartgain automatically use track gain when playing a single album but in random order? I would of guessed otherwise (that is SB sees a complete album in the playlist and chooses album gain, even if random). But again, don't know. Another aside: The mp3 or AAC files I have (either only or from my FLAC files) I did use mp3tag to convert my itunes SOUNDCHECK values to the Album RG value (given that with SOUNDCHECK you can use only one value). So given that I could only have one, I went with Album Gain. I suppose this doesn't sound logical, given that with track value, I could use track gain for random play and simply turn OFF soundcheck on ipod for album play. But I didn't want to be bothered with that. And frankly, I rarely listen to IPOD anymore given my proliferation of SB players everywhere. -- garym ------------------------------------------------------------------------ garym's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17325 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=87061 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/ripping
