[Flac] Replay-gain

[Nicholas Wilson]

On Sunday 13 April 2008 8:10 am Charles Velasquez wrote:
> I used EAC and AutoFLAC to rip my CD collection.  In the EAC command line
> options for flac.exe, I added the --replay-gain parameter and in the
> AutoFLAC setup, I enabled the "Add Replaygain" checkbox.  I just downloaded
> foobar2000 and I can see that the replaygain values are there but after
> seeing that warning when converting my flac files to mp3, I became
> concerned.  I used AutoFLAC so that I can easily take my flac files and
> recreate the CD's if I ever needed to (can't get my folks to buy mp3/flac
> players yet and their CD's tend to get abused).  I want an exact copy of
> the original CD (as close as possible anyway).  Seeing that warning above
> makes me think that since I applied replaygain to my flac files when
> creating them, that I no longer have an original rip.

The problem (if there is one) will be in the conversion stage.  The ripping 
will, I am almost sure, have been done correctly by EAC, so you should not 
need to ever re-rip the CDs.  The problem is that mp3 does not support replay 
gain, so you are given the option of scaling the actual data before the 
encoding (normally, the unscaled data are stored, and the scaling factor is 
sent to the hardware's volume setting to get it to output the lossless data 
at the right volume).  Since mp3 is rubbish quality (compared flac 
certainly), this is probably what you want; the original flac file though is 
still lossless so can be used to make (except possibly for track padding) 
exact copies.

Nicholas