Re: replaygain, soundkonverter, aac/m4a glitch
On 10/3/2016 6:42 AM, Mark Fletcher wrote: On Sun, Oct 02, 2016 at 04:29:24PM -0700, Seeker wrote: Am I the only one on the list listening to music off of my phone over bluetooth in the car or having some other reason to want normalized music playback? :O :) No, but you are the only one top posting... (Sorry, couldn't resist it) I don't mind a little humor. :) I do what you said all the time, with several devices, including bluetooth headphones (which this list famously helped me get working) as well as using the phone as an audio source for the PC. I don't feel the need to futz around with the audio to do it. Mark It's less of an issue for me on the computer, but it would still be nice to have more normalized levels on the playback. Individual experience will differ, it depends on the range of stuff you have in your collection and listening habits, whole albums versus random play. The extremes in my collection between the quiet tracks and the loud tracks are too extreme. I don't want to reduce the level of the loud stuff excessively and I don't want to bring the level of the quiet stuff up so much the clipping becomes an issue. So even with normalization there will be quieter and louder stuff, but in theory the levels will be close enough. Some of the worst offenders were/are things that were recorded to the computer from cassette tapes, metal oxide versus normal tape, differing levels of tape degradation, lack of knowledge on my part on how to compensate for some of the issues to get the best end result, etc... Some of those have since been replaced by CD versions, others I continue to keep an eye out for as I shop for other things. Even without taking that into consideration there are some pretty big extremes. Age is probably the next biggest factor, 20s/30s, versus 40s/50s versus 60s/70s versus 80s/90s versus 2k+ Genre/style factors in as well. For the phone, if I am wearing earbuds and have turned up the the volume for something quiet, the loud stuff is too loud. When I am running, the bluetooth headset volume is limited to a lower level which takes care of the 'too loud' part, but the quiet stuff gets lost to road noise, depending on how close to a road I am and how much traffic there is. Over bluetooth in the car, my car is not the worst at blocking road noise, but not great either, so quiet stuff being lost to road noise versus loud stuff becoming an assault on the ears. The car is the most annoying case for me. As I get replaygain tags applied to more of my music, I am having more road trips where I never touch the volume after I have made the initial adjustment. Vanilla Music on the phone does have extra options on it's replaygain menu for setting a "replaygain pre-amp" value and to reduce the volume for tracks that do not have replaygain tags. Have to investigate those options further. Probably more useful for playlists than for listening to the entire music collection on random play, and random play of my entire collection is what I do +95% of the time. Later, Seeker
Re: replaygain, soundkonverter, aac/m4a glitch
On 10/3/2016 2:39 AM, Jonathan Dowland wrote: On Sun, Oct 02, 2016 at 04:29:24PM -0700, Seeker wrote: Am I the only one on the list listening to music off of my phone over bluetooth in the car or having some other reason to want normalized music playback? :O :) I've never used replaygain but it's on my "look at" list. Your initial evaluation of what is available/works and what doesn't is really useful, thanks. If it turns out the best tools at the moment are not in Debian, then I would be interested in helping to make them so. I'll put some time aside to re-read your messages more thoroughly, but please if you do any further research do post it here. Thanks Considering how long the tools have been around and the amount of support there is in playback software for reading the replaygain information the options seem surprisingly limited on calculating the gain and adding the tags. I did find something else. Since this thread was intended to be more specifically about Soundkonverter I will post that as a reply to my other message. Replaygain, alternatives to Easymp3gain-gtk/-qt https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2016/09/msg00751.html Later, Seeker
Re: replaygain, soundkonverter, aac/m4a glitch
On Mon 03 Oct 2016 at 22:42:43 (+0900), Mark Fletcher wrote: > On Sun, Oct 02, 2016 at 04:29:24PM -0700, Seeker wrote: > > Am I the only one on the list listening to music off of my phone over > > bluetooth in the car or having some other reason to want normalized music > > playback? :O :) > > > > No, but you are the only one top posting... > > (Sorry, couldn't resist it) Hmm. It's certainly top-posting when replies precede what they're replies to. I don't consider making a rhetorical aside like that as top-posting. It usefully keeps the remark apart from the facts below, and doesn't in any way depend on it. > I do what you said all the time, with several devices, including > bluetooth headphones (which this list famously helped me get working) as > well as using the phone as an audio source for the PC. I don't feel the > need to futz around with the audio to do it. Well, setting a different volume setting for each track is about the least futzing one can do with any sound system, which is why even the dumbest player has a volume control. (The inability of US TV stations to equalise their sound between programmes and adverts is staggering.) But assuming you don't use headphones when driving (illegal in Japan, varies in the US) then your repertoire must be different from ours. Most post~1750 classical music makes for difficult listening in a car. It is quite beyond my understanding why vehicle manufacturers don't supply systems with volume-compression. One of the downsides of the demise of vinyl is the ridiculous dynamic range used on some modern recordings. But that paragraph explains why track normalisation is not enough for me. I've tried to write a function to compand on the fly with sox, but without much success. That wouldn't work with my phone anyway. I load all the MP3s on our gogear with companded music so that it can be used satisfactorily in the street, but there it's just a step in the already necessary conversion¹. My phone plays a much greater range of source formats which I just copy onto the SD card. Companding gigabytes of files ahead of time is a pain. So I would be interested if my view of MP3 tags underestimates their usefulness as a track is played, and whether there are players that can compand/compress on the fly. ¹ timidity/ffmpeg|avconv/cdparanoia ⇉ .wavs ⇉ sox...compand...files → lame → .mp3 Cheers, David.
Re: replaygain, soundkonverter, aac/m4a glitch
On Sun, Oct 02, 2016 at 04:29:24PM -0700, Seeker wrote: > Am I the only one on the list listening to music off of my phone over > bluetooth in the car or having some other reason to want normalized music > playback? :O :) > No, but you are the only one top posting... (Sorry, couldn't resist it) I do what you said all the time, with several devices, including bluetooth headphones (which this list famously helped me get working) as well as using the phone as an audio source for the PC. I don't feel the need to futz around with the audio to do it. Mark
Re: replaygain, soundkonverter, aac/m4a glitch
On Sun, Oct 02, 2016 at 04:29:24PM -0700, Seeker wrote: > Am I the only one on the list listening to music off of my phone over > bluetooth in the car or having some other reason to want normalized music > playback? :O :) I've never used replaygain but it's on my "look at" list. Your initial evaluation of what is available/works and what doesn't is really useful, thanks. If it turns out the best tools at the moment are not in Debian, then I would be interested in helping to make them so. I'll put some time aside to re-read your messages more thoroughly, but please if you do any further research do post it here. Thanks signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: replaygain, soundkonverter, aac/m4a glitch
Am I the only one on the list listening to music off of my phone over bluetooth in the car or having some other reason to want normalized music playback? :O :) On 10/2/2016 1:18 PM, Seeker wrote: Where the glitch comes in is with m4a files. The replay gain tool just shows question marks in the track and album gain fields. Tried checking the box to force recalculation then clicked the 'Tag Untagged' button, looked like it was behaving correctly and doing the calculation/recalculation, still shows question marks. Easymp3gain shows the gain has been set. Next found a different album of m4a files, loaded them in Easymp3gain to verify the tags were there, loaded them in the replaygain tool and again it just showed question marks. I did also post a message in the KDE forum asking if anybody else has seen this behavior https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=19=136507 As I write this there were 6 views, no replies. Same question here, anybody else seeing this behavior? More information. Found some m4a files that did not have replaygain tags. Clicking 'tag untagged' then checking at the command line aacgain -s c * showed no replaygain data returning to the replaygain tool, checking the box to for recalculation, then clicking 'tag untagged' aacgain -s c * shows replaygain data. Later, Seeker
replaygain, soundkonverter, aac/m4a glitch
The story so far. On Debian unstable. Easymp3gain was removed from Debian unstable. Settling in on alternatives before I remove it from my system. Not completely against using the different *gain tools from the command line, but would prefer GUI. Tried QTGain https://sourceforge.net/projects/qtgain/ Apparently from the change log it had more of an interface, but went back to minimal with the port to QT5. Initially had a not previously gained mp3 file to test. After letting QTGain do it's thing, something seemed a little odd when looking with easymp3gain, the replaygain tool in Soundkonverter, and Musicbrainz Picard to see what replaygain information they showed. After adding, removing, adding, removing with no issues, went back to QTGain a second time and after using QTGain the second time, Easymp3gain showed the volume at 89, instead of volume '92' and track tag '-3'. So QTGain is out. Generally speaking I'm leaning toward using the replaygain tool in Soundkonverter, looked good from my initial testing with mp3, ripped 3 CDs and used it for them so it looks good with vorbis audio. Where the glitch comes in is with m4a files. The replay gain tool just shows question marks in the track and album gain fields. Tried checking the box to force recalculation then clicked the 'Tag Untagged' button, looked like it was behaving correctly and doing the calculation/recalculation, still shows question marks. Easymp3gain shows the gain has been set. Next found a different album of m4a files, loaded them in Easymp3gain to verify the tags were there, loaded them in the replaygain tool and again it just showed question marks. I did also post a message in the KDE forum asking if anybody else has seen this behavior https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=19=136507 As I write this there were 6 views, no replies. Same question here, anybody else seeing this behavior? Later, Seeker
