Interesting idea.

What you're saying is... write a Linux program to run on the Empeg... It runs through your Empeg's files, analyzes their volume levels, and adds the appropriate relative-volume command to the music database for each song.

Simple. Elegant. Relatively easy to implement (when compared to a dynamic system). Doesn't affect caching or CPU cycles during playback. The resulting data could simply appear as another field on the song's property sheet in Emplode, allowing you to manually tweak the numbers if you choose.

It could even happen automatically at upload time, as part of the synchronization process. After the rest of the synch is complete, any songs on the Empeg's hard drive that don't yet have the field tagged would get scanned. The first time a user runs this new version of the software, it would run on all their songs, and it would take a long time, but subsequent runs would only analyze new uploads, so it would be quick.

Even then, you could optimize the process by only analyzing some of the frames. Say, every other frame or every third frame. I'd bet you'd get the same results. A little experimentation could give you the optimal balance between how accurate the analysis is compared to how much time you spend decoding frames.

The initial version could simply run the analysis as a batch job after the songs have been uploaded. Future versions could speed up the process by performing the analysis as the song data is being uploaded, resulting in practically no extra synch time wasted at all.

Of course, it would have to be a selectable option in Emplode-- Users who have already pre-normalized their songs should be able to turn off the option.

But most importantly, this is an elegant solution because it would be transparent to the end-user. They wouldn't need to worry about anything more than whether or not to select this menu option. Just select the menu option, and the Empeg magically normalizes all the songs on the next synch.

I like it. I really like it.

"Mac", are you reading this? What do you think?