Replay Gain

[Michael S.]

Noticed that PerfectTunes has a feature to add a Replay Gain tag to files - what is the benefit of doing this? Is this for volume leveling between CD's? Does it have any downsides or can it create any problems?

[GBrown]

Noticed that PerfectTunes has a feature to add a Replay Gain tag to files - what is the benefit of doing this? Is this for volume leveling between CD's? Does it have any downsides or can it create any problems?

Replaygain values are non-destructive. They can be adjusted or deleted at any time and do not affect the integrity of the original audio. Not all players support Replaygain.
Do not use any "Normalizing" DSP on originals though, as this is a permanent change in most cases. If you must, only apply this to a copy to avoid any permanent and undoable changes.

[garym]

I add replaygain tags (album/track, LUFS -18) to all my CD rips. As gbrown notes, these are just tags that can be used by a replaygain capable server/player. I use the ReplayGain utility DSP in the Ripping settings. My settings for RG DSP, under advanced settings are: Album and Track, LUFS -18, do not tick the 'disable clip protection' and 'true peak' 2x oversample.

edit: GBrown talks about not using a 'normalizing' DSP. In dbpoweramp, this would be "Volume Normalize" this analyzes just like the ReplayGain tags, but then permanently changes the underlying audio. So do not do this on your main files. Some folks use this when they create lossy versions of files to use in a car, etc. where the player may not recognize/use ReplayGain tag info.