Originally Posted by
garym
First understand that -18 vs -23 is equivalent to a minor adjustment of your volume knob on your stereo. Nothing more nothing less. There is nothing magical about this. The only issue is that if some things are -18 and some are -23, then you'll lose the benefit of RG playback (which after all is to try to "equalize" the playback volume of different CDs so you don't have to change the volume knob on every song/album).
Also, you can point at your parent music directory and reapply RG to ALL your folders in one single batch. I have > 6,000 albums. But they are all under one parent directory
music\
music\artist
music\artist\album\tracks....
So If I point at the top directory (music) and run the RG DSP on it, it will handle all 6,000 albums at once. no problem.
1.. adding new tag will auto overwrite the old tag, no need to delete.
2. why change from 5 to 8. I can't recall the calculations, but the space saved would be minor. I looked at this once because I have so many CDs, but I calculated that the difference between 5 and 8 across even 6,000 CDs was a trivial amount of space.
3. going from any FLAC to any FLAC (compression change or anything) changes nothing about sound quality, etc. That's why these are called LOSSLESS files. Lossless=lossless=lossless, etc.
If I were you, I would continue ripping files using -23 RG (since all is at that level already), not redo my exisiting files, and maybe start using -8 compression going forward. But no need to convert all your old rips to -8.