Advanced Limiter on Replaygain?

[Andreilg]

Hello, currently what I do with my music library is I create an archive of albums I like, write album replaygain to them, and convert them to aiff with the replaygain written to the new tracks permanently. I do this because my players don't support replaygain and this still gives me the option of having an archive of the original files.

However, my issue is with the prevent clipping option. I like to listen to ambient and classical music and despite not running into any albums that increase in volume, the idea of clip prevention seems to undermine the point of replaygain when it does kick in. If there's a millisecond of an inaudible clip, the entire album goes down in volume.

I've read online that some people use an advanced limiter with clip prevention off to only reduce the volume at the clips and nowhere else. I'd like to do this as well as I think it is the best of both worlds. How can I go about doing this with dBpoweramp?

[schmidj]

Re: Advanced Limiter on Replaygain?

You can do this with some audio editors. I use the limiter in Izotope's Restoration RX6 advanced (I believe also available as a stand alone program and probably as a plug-in) on recordings I engineer myself, but it costs many times what you are paying for dBpoweramp. If the clip is truly inaudible, and many but by no means all are, you can turn off the prevent clipping option.

[Andreilg]

Re: Advanced Limiter on Replaygain?

Hey, thanks for your response. I own RX6 but I want the advanced limiting to occur at the same time as the replaygain is applied to the file. As far as I know, RX has no way of doing that right?

[schmidj]

Re: Advanced Limiter on Replaygain?

That would have to happen in your player, not dBpoweramp. RX doesn't deal with replay gain, but the advanced version has an excellent loudness processor with a pretty transparent limiter. You could rip the files with no replay gain tag, then process each file with the RX loudness processor. Time consuming as you have to process each file individually.

Some players have replay gain processors with built in limiters. I know Poweramp on the Android does. (no connection to dBpoweramp AFAIK.)

[Andreilg]

Re: Advanced Limiter on Replaygain?

Well as I mentioned my players don't support replaygain so I'm trying to print the replaygain into the track. Not sure what using RX would do in this scenario...The replaygain printing and limiting would have to occur in one process, not separately.

[schmidj]

Re: Advanced Limiter on Replaygain?

OK, so you want to adjust the audio level of the track to a particular LKFS (or whatever you want to call the loudness measurement in your flavor of loudness measurement and to at the same time limit any peaks that would exceed 0 dBFS (or some lower number)? Actually modifying the audio in the resulting file, not just writing a tag? If so, on a track by track basis, the loudness part of Izotope Restoration 6 (or 5) Advanced will do that, very nicely. In fact that is how I process audio tracks recorded live on location for burning onto CD or converting to various flavors of audio files.

[Andreilg]

Re: Advanced Limiter on Replaygain?

Yes. How do I achieve an album gain type of replaygain by using RX6?