I play my music through either Squeezeboxes or iPods, I haven't used mp3gain or similar before, is this the best way to (reversibly) equalize volume levels so that all tracks are similar in volume?

It's just now that the kids are buying music their downloaded stuff seems to be much louder than my old ripped mp3s so if I do a playlist for a party then volume levels are all over the place.

MP3gain for the Squeezeboxes, apply it using foobar.

iPods have their own system, enable Sound Check in iTunes.

You can apply MP3gain while ripping with dbpoweramp.

Maybe I was doing it wrong, but I never got good results with volume equalization. The music I listen to has a lot of dynamic range. If you compare the flute/oboe duet in the William Tell Overture to the "storm" passage that precedes it, and to the "Lone Ranger" passage that follows, equalizing the volume pretty well ruins the piece.

But, depending on the sort of music you listen to, YMMV.

tanstaafl.

You likely were doing it wrong.

When you do MP3gain properly you end up with a gain value for each track and an overall gain value for each album. If you were playing back your music randomly you'd use the track gain to make each random track match in volume.

If however you are playing back an album at a time, you use the album gain value. So while each album is matched in volume to the next, the relative volume of the tracks within the album is unchanged. And hence you maintain the dynamic range within each album.

The Squeezebox software has a setting called smart gain that automatically switches from track gain to album gain depending on how you are listening.

I imagine you were just using track gain values.

And also, if you where using the auto volume stuff in the Hijack kernel then that is a whole other form of volume levelling. It does it dynamically as it goes along, looking ahead to see how loud or quiet the next bit of audio is and turning the volume up or down.

It is a very agressive approach, that can be very handy in car, but isnt really suited to considered classical listening

Yes. I couldn't remember when or how I had done it until you reminded me.

tanstaafl.

MP3gain is really very, very different to the Hijack auto volume. The auto volume stuff can introduce all sort of nasty artefacts (it really doesn't like The Police - Don't Stand So Close to Me).

It also levels the volume within tracks, MP3gain doesn't do that in any cases.

BTW I still use the auto volume in car, it works well in car as long as you accept the occasional oddity like Don't Stand So Close to Me.

I am a bit embarrassed that I ported the auto volume stuff to the Rio Receiver, don't know what I was thinking about thinking that would be a good idea !

Thanks Andy, so just to get this clearer in my head I need to apply track AND album gain? And the gain data will not be read by the iPods? That's a bit of a bummer, specially since I don't use iTunes!

Yes, you want mp3gain track and album tags.

The mp3gain tags will not be read by any of the iPods. Apple use their own tag for storing gain data. When using iTunes this gets automatically calculated for each track when you enable Sound Check (I don't know whether it calculates track and album gains or just track ones).

I uses iTunes for syncing my music to my iPhone, so this isn't a problem I've had to deal with.

This script claims to be able to apply the Apple tag using the mp3gain tags as the source and so should allow iTunes free volume leveling:

http://www.vdberg.org/~richard/rg2sc.html

Brilliant, thanks Andy I knew this was the right place to ask

Just for clarity, the tagging standard is called "ReplayGain". Squeezeboxes apparently understand ReplayGain tags natively, which is nice. For Itunes/Ipod, the script linked by Andy will convert ReplayGain tags to Apple's proprietary volume-levelling tags, so the files will play nicely on Ipods too if synchronised using Itunes.

Mp3gain, on the other hand, is one of the many programs which can create ReplayGain tags. (Foobar2000 is another.) Do note that Mp3gain also has other modes of operation, which you don't want. In particular it can "apply" the discovered gain settings, which changes the MP3 so that even dumb, non-ReplayGain-enabled players (such as Empeg and Karma) play it at the levelled volume. That's not what you want, not least because you can only do that for one out of track gain and album gain.

If using mp3gain, what you want are the "track analysis" and "album analysis" options, making sure that it's set to write APEv2 tags and not any other sort. Steer clear of the "apply" options.

Peter

I can't see where you would specify what kind of tag to write (in mp3gain)

Ah yes, sorry about that.