replaygain

This thread may have started on tuning, but it seems more
appropriate here. For all of us who are trying to release
microtonal or otherwise music digitally.

I'm changing my mind about replaygain (.org). Are you
forever fussing with your volume knob? Replaygain is a
group of standards (vorbisgain, mp3gain, wavegain) that
attempt to get all files to play back at a certain
perceived loudness, so you can 'set and forget' your
volume knob.

We can't just normalize all files, because that sets the
peak amplitude, not the average loudness. But we *must*
respect the peak amplitude no matter what. Actually, when
faced with clipping, replaygain either allows you to apply
less than the recommended gain or do "hard limiting" to
prevent clipping. In the former case, you get the same
result as if you would have normalized. In the latter
case, you're applying compression to your music (yuck!).

The nice thing about replaygain is that it doesn't have
you normalizing your masters, which results in rounding
errors affecting their fidelity. Instead, it just tells
the playback client (say, winamp) how much gain to apply.
So you still get rounding errors, but they don't pile up.
In other words, as I argued a few weeks ago, one should
apply any gain at the last possible moment, so it only
happens once.

But it seems to be that the last possible moment is at the
knob itself! Let the person compress it at the knob if
they want (say, for in the car). And re-writing a volume
control is a heckuva lot easier than having everyone in
the World analyzing their wav files!

So why should I give up any dynamic range? I'll just
record to 24-bit, normalize, dither down to 16 bit and
ship. To hell with Texas.

-Carl

Carl,

{you wrote...}
>This thread may have started on tuning, but it seems more appropriate here.

Glad you're sharing it over here as well.

>For all of us who are trying to release microtonal or otherwise music >digitally.

Absolutely. When I've got some time I'll check out replaygain and see how it works for me. But I also wanted to share the following, which came up on two other lists:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 09:19:20 +0200
From: mzmk
To: microsound <microsound@...>
Subject: [microsound] Digital distortion white paper

30 years since people started using digital recording and they are
still discovering fun new problems ...

http://www.tllabs.com/files/Digital%20distortion%20white%20paper.pdf

One thing I *will* say is that compression, which you mention a bit, is a tool like any other - it can be abused. That said, I still think there are musics that not only benefit from compression, but are truly enhanced by a *musical* application of it. But that speaks to specific pieces or groups of pieces, and the replaygain scenario sounds like it can be applied across the board. All we have to remember is that everything isn't the same, even music - if we treat it all the same we might lose something as well as gain something.

Cheers,
Jon

Jon wrote...

> www.tllabs.com/files/Digital%20distortion%20white%20paper.pdf

Interesting.

>One thing I *will* say is that compression, which you mention
>a bit, is a tool like any other - it can be abused. That said,
>I still think there are musics that not only benefit from
>compression, but are truly enhanced by a *musical* application
>of it.

Oh, I agree. But for properly-recording chamber music, I don't
think compression has any place, unless one is listening in a
noisy car.

-Carl

Carl,

{you wrote...}
>But for properly-recording chamber music, I don't think compression has >any place, unless one is listening in a noisy car.

No kidding. Most traditional 'classical' music is in no way made for listening in a noisy environment like (most) cars. When I take driving trips I don't ever pop in that kind of stuff, even if I have it along on the trip. Rather listen to the Jayhawks any day, on the road...

Cheers,
Jon