Smart Gain?

[Carson Dyle]

Rockbox has a ReplayGain setting of "Track Gain if shuffling", which applies Track Gain when Shuffle mode is on, Album Gain otherwise. (Haven't found documentation yet that states what happens if Album Gain is missing. I assume it uses Track Gain in that case.)

IMO, there are two problems with this approach:

• When playing a playlist, typically made up of tracks from different albums, with Shuff off I would want Track Gain instead of Album Gain.
• When playing an album with Shuffle on, I would prefer Album Gain instead of Track Gain.

Squeezebox Server has a nice setting that they call "Smart Gain".  It applies Album Gain whenever a track follows another from the same album, otherwise it applies Track Gain.  Seems like a better approach than just looking at whether Shuffle is enabled.

Would this make sense for Rockbox?

[Lear]

(Haven't found documentation yet that states what happens if Album Gain is missing. I assume it uses Track Gain in that case.)

Correct.

Squeezebox Server has a nice setting that they call "Smart Gain".  It applies Album Gain whenever a track follows another from the same album, otherwise it applies Track Gain.  Seems like a better approach than just looking at whether Shuffle is enabled.

Would this make sense for Rockbox?

Not sure about that, because the playback part doesn't really know much about albums and stuff (and doesn't always have the metadata for several tracks ahead). However, it ought to be possible to check for the same album name and artist (if both are present in the metadata, and the metadata is available for both the current and the next track when the decision needs to be made), and then choose gain based on that.

Also, the logic seems a bit odd to me. E.g., when playing a sequence of albums, the first track of each album would get track gain and the second would get album gain. Maybe there's more to smart gain than described...

[torne]

You would have to compare albumartist, not artist. Also, I assume it also checks the *next* track as well as the previous one... even then that might behave oddly though if you have, say, two albums in a playlist together, shuffled, there will be lots of runs of tracks from the same album but not in the right order.

[Carson Dyle]

Also, the logic seems a bit odd to me. E.g., when playing a sequence of albums, the first track of each album would get track gain and the second would get album gain. Maybe there's more to smart gain than described...

You're right. I didn't describe the logic terribly well. It applies Album Gain to any successive songs from the same album.