Loudness War ... how loud is your music?

Most of you will know about the so called "Loudness War" ... you can look it up here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

I was wondering how loud the music in my collection is ... so I looked for a way to calculate the average loudness of a recording - preferably an CD or mp3 (conversion to mp3 doesn't affect the calculation). As it turned out I had been calculating it all along - it directly shows in the replay gain value:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_Gain

Replay Gain comes with many audio players, as listed on the wikipedia page. If you have Winamp you can calculate the replay gain by right-clicking any list of tracks (preferably entire albums) in the media library and choose "Send To -> Calculate Replay Gain". The resulting values are stored as meta tags in the mp3 files, and you can list them in the media library as columns - you can also sort by these columns ... and find out which of your recordings are most affected by the loudness war, and which were mastered in a more audiophile fashion. The replay gain value is the difference in loudness to a reference level (89dB if I remember correctly) - a negative value means that the music is louder than the reference level and needs to be attenuated, a positive value means that the music is less loud than the reference level (preferable/audiophile) and has to be turned up on playback to achieve equal loudness.

A pretty technical post - but I hope it is of value for someone!


Edited by MikeEnRegalia - June 05 2008 at 16:35

you mean that the topic is too geeky? Maybe ... but in Tech Talk a topic *has* to be like that.

^ so far I've found out that the classical music (from CDs) has an album replay gain of about 0dB ... some even +2dB. The bulk of the collection is around -5dB, and some albums max out at -14dB.

 That's pretty neat... and as I suspected Love Metal by HIM comes out pretty poorly, not only with a poor album gain, but also little variation across the tracks. (I had to try this first as it is the album that irks me the most )

I'll repeat what I said in another thread:

MikeEnRegalia wrote: Calculating the replay gain is a convenient way of finding out how loud a track is - it calculates the root mean square of the loudness (dBFS). I agree that modern productions tend to be louder, but of course there are many exceptions.

they are not louder in general, they are simply less dynamic. the loud sounds still are as loud as they used to be, but the quiet sounds have been made louder, though this is totally unnecessary. one album this was tested with was the latest reissue of "Sergeant Pepper's", by the way. it was compared to older versions which were more dynamic

MikeEnRegalia wrote: in fact the loud sounds have also become louder. The signal is more compressed - there's less "distance" between quiet and loud sound - and the average loudness is also increasing. If you ripped both the first CD release and the latest reissue of the album to your hard drive (mp3) and calculated the replay gain of both albums, the latter one would probably have a more negative value, meaning that you would have to attenuate volume to achieve equal loudness.

not according to the study, Mike. maybe it is your impression, but the study says a clear "no" to that

What?

 

 

 

 

 

 

MikeEnRegalia wrote: @BaldJean: Which study? All the other studies and wikipedia pages I read say that the loudness is increasing ... this is what the terms "loudness war" and "loudness race" are all about. But perhaps we mean the same thing ... by moving the silent sounds closer to the loud sounds (decreasing the dynamic range) the whole signal becomes louder, because the louder parts are boosted too.

this is NOT about compression