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Topic ClosedLoudness War ... how loud is your music?
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Dean View Drop Down
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2008 at 18:07
Thumbs%20Up 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 )
 
Of course what it doesn't show is the degree of clipping and damaged peaks that occured to achieve the high loudness levels, and ReplayGain correction will never recover that.
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micky View Drop Down
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Points: 46833 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2008 at 17:59
I had read that somewhere about the classical stuff...   I think I'll do some fiddling with this later and see how Barbs or Willie stack up vs. Opeth or Mastodon  against Rachmaninoff or Debussy LOL

Always seeking creative ways to pass the evenings alone here hhahah
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Points: 21149 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2008 at 17:52
^ 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.
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Points: 46833 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2008 at 17:46
Originally posted by MikeEnRegalia MikeEnRegalia wrote:

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


oh no... I wasn't trying to say it was 'geeky' at all  LOL... I meant I think they would be sort of interesting to look at ...
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Points: 21149 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2008 at 17:41
LOL you mean that the topic is too geeky? Maybe ... but in Tech Talk a topic *has* to be like that.Wink
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Points: 46833 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2008 at 17:27
hahahha...  that ranks about a 10 on the sh*ts and giggles scale Mike...  think my loudness quotient would be pretty high up.
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Points: 21149 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: June 05 2008 at 16:06
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!Smile


Edited by MikeEnRegalia - June 05 2008 at 16:35
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