elgrandee

Why whould I need ReplayGain?

All albums and songs are mixed differently. So in iTunes some albums sounds very loud whilst other is rather low. This has increased in something called the Loudness War. Producers of albums soon realized that if you mix an album really hot, it will sound louder then the other songs on crappy stereo equipment. So essentially you have a lot of music in your iPod/iPhone with albums recorded at totally different volume. That’s why you have to constantly change the volume knob to correct for this. Here Apple comes to the rescue with it’s Automatic Volume Settings. Unfortunately the algorithm Apple chose to use to determine the volume of the song is made to be quick, but not particularly accurate. This mean that the songs does come out all over the place volume vise.But there is an good solution to this problem, and it?s name is ReplayGain.

The ReplayGain algorithm analyzes the music psycho acoustically and then makes an assessment on witch level the song/album should be. Unfortunately Apple haven’t embraced this techique even though it’s totally open. Shame on you Apple.

ReplayGain application

But there’s a sollution. An application called iVolume that goes though all your songs in iTunes using ReplayGain and makes sure they have the same level. This mean that you can be certain in that you won?t have ear blead when a song of Sting ends and Mötorhead comes on.

The software is super easy to use, just start it and iTunes, make sure you have ?Sound Check? enabled in preferences in iTunes. After that you just push a button.

One downside only, the price is $29.95 witch I think is a bit high. But for me It was a must, it transforms the pleasure of listening to music.