[Flac-users] Grip, FLAC, and album replay gain

[Dan Clemmensen]

OK, here's a problem:

I want to set the album replay gain in each track, but I'm using grip to
rip and encode the tracks one by one. grip knows that all the tracks are
on a single album, but FLAC sees them one at a time. I put the
    --replay-gain
option on the FLAC command line, so it emits four comments into the 
vorbis commebnt block, e.g.:
     comment[9]: REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK=0.99996948
     comment[10]: REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN=-2.15 dB
     comment[11]: REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_PEAK=0.99996948
     comment[12]: REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_GAIN=-2.15 dB
Unfortunately, the album numbers are simply a repeat of the track
numbers since FLAC did not "see" all the tracks at once.

I can get grip to compute and emit the album replay gain, and grip
will execute a user-specified command at the end of each album,
with the album replay gain as a parameter is so desired. However,
grip does not seem to want to do this for the album peak. I assume
that the album peak is simply the largest track peak. Is this
correct?

If so, I'll write a simple script to run at the end of each
album. This script will run metaflac on each .flac file in
the album directory to extract each peak. It will compute
the album peak, and then run metaflac on each file again to
change the album gain and the album peak. Is there an easier
way to do this?

Other possibilities:
    --add album and track peak computations to grip. Add
      an option to have grip rip the entire album before
      encoding any track. Add an option to flac to add
      just the track gain and peak, not the album gain and peak
    --store and pass album information to players separately,
      (in playlists?) rather than inside the .flac file