[flac-dev] R128gain & metaflac

[Ian Nartowicz]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2014 16:39:12 -0700
"Timothy B. Terriberry" <tterribe at xiph.org> wrote:

>Ian Nartowicz wrote:
>> The Opus replaygain spec is fundamentally broken, so let's ignore that for
>> now.  It is discussed ad nauseam elsewhere, but isn't going to change any
>> time soon.
>
>I haven't seen anyone make any concrete proposals for how it should 
>change. Maybe I missed something.
>
>AFAIK, the only objection to it is that there is no way to distinguish 
>between whether the header gain is also an R128 album gain, or if it has 
>some other semantic meaning. That seems simple to address, not 
>"fundamentally broken".
>
It is certainly the biggest issue.  Sure it should be simple to address, but
nobody seems willing to do so.  The only response I've had so far is that the
output gain should *always* be applied, yet it *might* be an album gain.  It
can't be both and there is no way to tell which.  Sorry, but that makes it
unsuited for use in a music player without the sort of overly complex options
I've had to add.  Any half-decent music player allows the user to choose
whether they want album gain, track gain, or neither, and following the Opus
spec doesn't support this.

The second issue is the lack of defined peak tags.  I could care less, but some
people care deeply and it is a relatively standard feature of music players.
The Opus spec doesn't define such tags, but it does explicitly say not to use
the REPLAYGAIN* tags.  Again that's just not viable.

--ian