Batch Convert and definition of album for replaygain

[randym]

When doing batch converting the album replaygain can either be determined assuming the album is all files selected or it accords with the album tags. Is there an option to customize how albums are defined like in Foobar 2000?

I ask because I break up my classical CDs into albums associated with “works” but I want replaygain to be determined by CD. My flac tags include custom tag “CD” that is the CD description and “CDNUM” that is blank for single CDs and the first CD of a multi-CD set and is CD”N” for the Nth CD of a multi-CD set. In foobar 2000, albumgain values are determined by defining an album as “%cd% | %cdnum%.” Can DbPowerAMP do something similar?

Thanks,
Randy

[Spoon]

Re: Batch Convert and definition of album for replaygain

Wouldn't the album id tag be the same for all the tracks in an album?

[randym]

Re: Batch Convert and definition of album for replaygain

Wouldn't the album id tag be the same for all the tracks in an album?

Yes, but for my classical collection albums don't correspond to CDs and I want the album replaygain to correspond to a CD.

For example, a CD might include Beethoven's 4th and 5th symphonies. I break up the CD into two albums, one for the 4th and one for the 5th. Suppose the 4th is meant to be quiet and the 5th is meant to be loud. I don’t want to apply replaygain to each symphony separately as would occur with the dbpoweramp converter if I let it do replaygain by album tag. Instead, I want album replaygain to be the same for all tracks on the CD. I can easily do this with foobar 2000 because it lets you define album (for the purposes of replaygain) as a string made up of concatenated tags. I have a custom flac tag idenfiying the CD as “Beethoven Sym 4 & 5 – Ferencsik.” I can tell foobar 2000 to identify album with that tag.

For multi-CD boxed sets, it gets more complicated. In this case, my cd tag is the same for all of the CDs that are part of the boxed set but I want to apply album replaygain to each CD of the set separately. (I have discovered that the album replaygain can vary substantially across CDs of a boxed set, as boxed sets are often collections that were recorded decades apart.) So I have another custom flac tag “CDNUM” that allows me to do album replaygain on each CD of the set as explained in my first post.

Randy

[Spoon]

Re: Batch Convert and definition of album for replaygain

Make sense, we can only use the Album tag. It would be possible to do what you ask at the ripping stage, just rip the ones together which should be together for album mode.

[randym]

Re: Batch Convert and definition of album for replaygain

Make sense, we can only use the Album tag. It would be possible to do what you ask at the ripping stage, just rip the ones together which should be together for album mode.

That is what I have been doing for my flac rips. And with R11.5 I was converting to MP3 and transferring the replaygain tags. Now that I am aware that proper MP3 replaygains are different than the flac replaygains, I need to do replaygain for the MP3s separately. If I did that at the rip stage, I'd have to manually tag both the flac and the mp3 versions---could do it by copying tags but that would be a big hassle.

As of now, my most efficient option is to use foobar 2000 to apply replaygain to the MP3s after they are converted with DBpoweramp. It would be slightly more efficient if DBpoweramp could do the replaygain at the same time as the conversion.

I brought this up to find out if dbpoweramp has the foobar 2000 capability and, if not, to make you aware of the foobar 2000 implementation in case you would think it a neat idea you'd like to mimic.

Incidentally, I did verify that replaygain applied to flacs and the corresponding MP3s can be quite different. The average gains are very similar, but the peaks can be very different.

Randy