replay gain support (reading and writing tags)

[Nikil Mehta]

A really useful feature that I'd like to see in Listen is support for replay gain tags. These are basically volume normalization tags (iTunes soundcheck does a similar thing). They indicate how to normalize a specific track relative to all other tracks and also how to normalize it relative to tracks in the same album.

Documentation on how one would implement the algorithm is at: http://replaygain.hydrogenaudio.org/contents.html

There would be two parts to implementing this. First, one would need to add support for reading the tags, calculating the volume adjustment, and then applying it. This should be pretty easy. The second part would be to add support for actually calculating the normalization level and tagging the files.

Personally I think just adding support for reading the tags would be awesome. There are numerous other tools to calculate and write the tags.

I'm trying to look into how to write a plugin that would do this, but obviously I'm unfamiliar with the codebase so it's kind of hard...

Ok, I'm looking through the code right now, and it looks like you use gstreamer. Turns out gstreamer already has a library for this: http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/gst-plugins-good-plugins/html/gst-plugins-good-plugins-plugin-replaygain.html

I'll see if I can figure out how to apply it. But I'm sure it'd be much faster for someone who knows what they're doing :)

[Mehdi Abaakouk (sileht)]

Gst plugins seem to be a good idea, i will do some test quickly

[Mehdi Abaakouk (sileht)]

I will add read support in 0.6.3, but writing is more difficult.

[Nikil Mehta (nikil.mehta)]

Wow, most responsive open source developer *ever*. Thanks- read support will be great.