in_vgm Replay Gain beta

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Maxim
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in_vgm Replay Gain beta

Post by Maxim »

Download

http://www.smspower.org/maxim/forumstuff/in_vgm_latest/in_vgm.zip

What's Replay Gain?


It makes all the music sound about the same loudness. That's right, your MP3s, The Adventures of Batman and Robin, and Deadly Moves all sound the same volume so you don't have to keep turning it up and down. Let me tell you, it's even cooler than you think it is.

How do I use it?

1. Replace your old program files\winamp\plugins\in_vgm.dll with the one you downloaded
2. Go to your Media Library (you might get by with the playlist if you're a ML holdout)
3. Right-click on an entire game and choose send to-calculate replay gain
4. Wish your computer was faster
5. Wait for it to finish
6. Yes, it takes a while
7. Click on "Save as album" (if you're sensible) or "Save as tracks" (if you actually like that FM radio sound)
8. Make sure the Replay Gain stuff is set to on (apply/no clip) in Winamp (it is by default)
9. ENJOY!!!!

What else?

Well, the transcoder works too, and I made a hack so Replay Gain applies to transcoded files (it's not supposed to really) and now you can just right-click-send to-ipod with your VGMs. And they sound good when they're there.

This is still beta, there's plenty of edge cases that aren't handled well at the moment and could potentially screw up a little. I reserve the right to invalidate all your precalculated data by changing the filename hash function it uses internally, if I think it's necessary.

I made it use a reduced version of the file for calculating Replay Gain (no looping, no fadeout) to speed things up, so analysing a transcoded file will show some slight errors; I think it's worth it.

Feedback is welcome, but I reserve the right to not actually do any work on this for another 6+ months if I can't find the time. Source is on SMS Power! SVN if anyone cares.
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Frosty
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Post by Frosty »

Thanks Maxim, this sounds useful :)
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Maxim
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Post by Maxim »

Out of interest:

Loudest set: Striker (album gain -2.06 dB)
Quietest set: Richard Scarry's Busytown (album gain +23.11 dB)

Loudest track: Gadget Twins - Level 3 Mid-Boss (track gain -4.75 dB)
Quietest track: Dune: The Battle for Arrakis - Radnor's Scheme (track gain +29.95 dB)

Go and listen to those tracks and then figure out why you need this...
Knurek
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Post by Knurek »

Well, XMPlay has an optional dynamic AMP ability, so it should handle files up to +15 dB fine.
Still, a nice thing to have. :)
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Maxim
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Post by Maxim »

I've used dynamic amp in Winamp a lot - random play is unbearable otherwise - but it's nowhere near as good, it basically destroys any amplitude range there may be in a track, or within a set.
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Dark Pulse
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Post by Dark Pulse »

You weren't kidding about it taking awhile, that's for sure... I feel like I could've slept while this thing finished.

Well, OK, maybe not, but I still could've spent ten minutes adding my contribution to plant growth and it still wouldn't have finished.

EDIT: And granted, the first thing I chose was Adventures of Batman and Robin... not exactly the friendliest tracks for Replay Gain to calculate, ne?

Good stuff, though for some reason it's a bit "poppy" when playing certain stuff.
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Maxim
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Post by Maxim »

I mass-calculated the whole lot overnight, the only nightmare was clicking all those "Save as album" buttons (AutoHotkey to the rescue there).

There's a setting in the Replay Gain code that does a "hard limit" thing to stop clipping, which is a kind of "compression" (ie. "poppy" or "FM radio") thing - it only happens on loud tracks on otherwise quiet albums. The alternatives are (1) turn down the gain on those tracks, but then their quiet bits will be too quiet, or (2) let them clip all to hell. I intend to make (1) optional and (2) is a matter of setting Winamp to "Apply gain" only.
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Dark Pulse
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Post by Dark Pulse »

Another thing I noticed... the problems with Japanese Tags not playing seems to be something with in_vgm, as unicoded MP3s work just fine now, but all VGMs still show a nice row of question marks. Any idea what's up there?
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Maxim
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Post by Maxim »

Email me something more clear (including screenshots, perhaps) and I'll take a look.
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Dark Pulse
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Post by Dark Pulse »

I'll just post them here. This board does have an attachment feature, you know. :p

Notice that while the Unicode displays fine in the GD3 Tag info, in Winamp itself it's quite buggered.

I'm using Arial Unicode MS for the font, and Unicode MP3s I have (Melty Blood Promised Dawn, to be specific) display fine. They don't in my mIRC winamp script, but I believe that's a totally seperate problem. :p
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