Is replay gain any good or is it better to normalize all mp3 in a program?

[james_uk]

As subject says, i've decided to get some bluetooth ear buds and some music i want, but i know they are all different volume levels so was wondering if the replay gain in Poweramp is decent and if i turn this on, am i best just with its default settings.

Or am i best leaving it off and batch processing the mp3's in a program with with normalize them all?

If the replay gain is decent then does it mean extra battery drain do you know?

Regards

James

[andrewilley]

If you do normalise the MP3 files, make sure you do it losslessly (just the packet header gain details are changed, not the actual music data). But to be honest, Replay Gain should do exactly the same thing.

Andre

[diguitar]

How do I set up Replay gain so that all songs are at the same audio level?

[james_uk]

Settings > Audio > Replay Gain

[andrewilley]

Your audio files do need to be properly tagged in the first place though, as Replay Gain is not a dynamic 'on-the-fly' music scanning system. It's very easy to check and/or create tagged files in  large batches with programs like foobar2000 though.

Andre

[james_uk]

I tagged all mine before adding them, I used a program called wxmp3gain

[james_uk]

As a matter of interest, so long as mp3's are tagged, will Poweramp only look at the tags if replay gain is enabled or will it take it from the tags anyway? meaning if you have tagged them you don't really need replay gain on?

[andrewilley]

If Replay Gain is not enabled, PA will not apply the gain value even if it is found in tags.

However the app you mentioned above is a front-end for MP3Gain, which adjusts the actual level of the audio file itself (by editing the MP3 packet headers, so it's a lossless change) rather than simply adding a single ReplyGain value to the main file header. If you do it that way, you've changed the volume of the physical music file itself, so it will always play that way in any app/program, and does not need Reply Gain support. 

Andre