RadioBOSS Support for MP3Gain tags

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

We use MP3Gain to normalise all of our MP3 files and find it very effective.

Does RadioBOSS support the playback volume tags created by MP3Gain ?  It would be very useful if it did.


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

Hello,

No, RadioBOSS doesn't support MP3Gain tags. But it has its own auto-leveling system

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

Would you consider adding MP3Gain tag support to RadioBOSS ?  It is much better method for normalising the audio levels because it is pre-calculated and tagged before the playing process - hence there are no surprises  during playback.

Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

OK, I think it will be added, but I don't promise it will be very soon. Probably it'll be in the end if July...

 

[dashford]

Hi -

I was wondering if MP3Gain support was, in fact, added.  It isn't mentioned in the News Archive of RB updates.  Thanks.

 

[djsoft]

Hi, not yet, it's still on our to-do list.

 

[robv]

Hi Jamie,

We also use vortexbox for our music library. Do you want support for replaygain tags instead? (as produced by the vortexbox)
mp3gain uses the same algorithm as replaygain to calculate the level change required for normalisation and adjusts the level in the mp3 encoding to suit. The tag does not need to be read if all your material is prepared this way as the normalisation is set in the encoding (The tag in mp3gain is there mainly for reversal though that can be lossy due to clipping/dropping data in quiet sections) Replaygain doesn't change the levels in the mp3 encoding, but just tags the level adjustment required, so it would benefit from being recognised by Radioboss and adjusted accordingly.
As an aside, you don't need to run mp3gain on a separate windows box. It can be installed on the vortexbox and run as a scheduled task. (I'm slowly digging through the mirroring process to try to add it there)

Robert Voice
Mansfield Community Radio
radiomansfield.org.au

 

[djsoft]

Regarding the requerst from the first post... I confused it with ReplayGain. As MP3Gain modifies mp3's, there's no special support needed to playback those files.

The support for ReplayGain is planned to be added in the near future (RadioBOSS 4.7.0).

 

[radiodungog]

Rob,

Thanks for the reply and suggestion.  I've not checked this forum over the Christmas period so apologies for the delayed response.

We use a Vortexbox and RadioBOSS and are keen to sort out the audio levels as stored on the Vortexbox before the file hits RadioBOSS.  There are significant variations in CD audio levels from one CD to another and it's handy to have them normalised when stored.

I was under the impression that MP3Gain was a "monitor, analyse and tag" bit of software.  When we have run MP3Gain the scrolling results screen indicates changes to the tags and not to the audio level itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3Gain

"MP3Gain does not introduce any digital generation loss because it does not decode and re-encode the file."

Have we misunderstood how it operates ?

Initially we ran MP3Gain from a Windows box but directed the process towards the Vortexbox.  Because it had to shuffle music files from the Vortexbox to the Windows box and back over the LAN it tended to be a little bit slow.

Then we logged into the Vortexbox via Putty and ran the command directly.  This made things a bit quicker but things were still pretty slow because we had so many music files to process.

We then got a bit smarter and decided to run several sessions of Putty and pointed the command to different music albums ... like all albums starting with A ... and all albums starting with B ... and so on.

Unfortunately something went wrong and we were not sure if it went wrong in the initial Putty request or the subsequent sessions we created ... but the end result was that the MP3 tags got corrupted and a heap of random characters were inserted in the tags where the album name should have been or the track name or year should have been or whatever ....

The end result of all of this was that we couldn't trust our Putty strategy any more so we then went back to the Vortexbox and converted all the FLAC files to MP3 again and that took 5-6 days of continuous work.  It might have taken even longer ...

We then used a Windows box and ran the MP3Gain command from it and went through the whole MP3 record library again ... it took days and days to do.

If replaygain can do the job on the Vortexbox automatically then that sounds like a good solution.  Doing MP3Gain manually and trying to guess which albums have been done and which have not is an almost impossible task.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replaygain

Are you sure that MP3Gain is not a successor to ReplayGain ?

In the MP3Gain wikipedia text in the first paragraph it says:

"(MP3Gain) It is an implementation of ReplayGain."


We'd love to get a solution to this that is automatic and integrates with RadioBOSS.

I wonder how we can run MP3Gain as a scheduled job AND have it clever enough to know which MP3 files have already been done and which ones are yet to be done.  This seems to be a tricky objective.


Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

"MP3Gain does not introduce any digital generation loss because it does not decode and re-encode the file."

Have we misunderstood how it operates ?

Yes, it's a feature of the software: it changes the sound level in MP3 files without re-encoding. The sound inside an MP3 file is stored as a sequence of frames, each frame has audio data and volume information, so, the utility just changes the volume values without changing audio content.
So, as I said - no special action required to support it. Files processed with MP3Gain will play as they should.

MP3Gain is just one of possible implementations of ReplayGain.
ReplayGain is a technology for normalizing loudness, and there are several ways to implement it:
- Add ReplayGain tag, players should read it and adjust the level according to this info (player has to support those tags). The audio data in the file remains unchanged.
- Change levels in MP3 files directly (as MP3Gain does), this will work on any player which plays MP3 files.

Regarding your situation... I think you should just run MP3Gain on a whole music library and wait until it completes. Use separate computer for this. After processing is done - copy the music back to your main computer. This is how I'd do it

 

[radium98]

Regarding your situation... I think you should just run MP3Gain on a whole music library and wait until it completes. Use separate computer for this. After processing is done - copy the music back to your main computer. This is how I'd do it I AGREE this what do i do .or use some kind of winamp dsp plugin like SXXXXXt limiter its also free.

 

[radiodungog]

Dmitry,

But with 60,000 tracks or 5,000 CD albums the music library is much too large to reprocess after adding 6 new CDs in a week.  There's got to be a better way to do this.  Perhaps another way is to set the Archive bit or flag on each file that has been tagged by MP3Gain and run MP3Gain every day and just process those MP3 files that the Archive unset on not flagged ... Is that a sensible option ?  That way we can process 6 CDs in 30 minutes and have the job done.

Thanks, Jamie C.

 

[djsoft]

As I see, the MP3Gain software doesn't have any kind of filter...
To add new files, it's easier to just add them to some folder first, process this folder by MP3Gain and then copy it to a place where files should be.

When I said to process whole library - it's a one-time job, just to prepare files you already have.

 

[radium98]

radiodungog THE BEST IS TO USE DIMITRY STATE  I DO IT EVERY TIME I HAVE NEW ALBUMS , OR USE DSP PLUGIN RB SUPPORT DSP PLUGIN THAT USE REAL TIME NORMALIZING ON THE FLY