[vorbis] RC3 Tagging/Encoding and Winamp answer

[Blue Jay]

That sounds like a pretty good idea to me.  Though I must mention that Sound
Forge's normalization plug-in does have an "equal loudness contour" option
which is supposed to do exactly what you mentioned - determine the
"preceptible" volume when normalizing a track.  I personally found this
option to produce worse results, so I use the standard algorithm.  I also
bump up the lowest volume threshold so that relatively quiet portions of the
track don't get included in the RMS calculation.  Out of 2200+ files
normalized with this method, I only found a few songs which seemed either
too loud or too soft.  With Audiograbber's average normalization, I did 25
songs with ogg rc3 as a test and found several that weren't right, not a
good ratio.  If a standard were to be set based roughly on the RMS (or
perceptible loudness) of a song, and included in the header info, I would
definitely support it.  Of course this means either the ogg decoder engine
(or variations written by 3rd parties) would need to be able to read this
value and adjust volume accordingly, or the player software must be made to
read this value and adjust the volume independently of the decoder engine.
It's certainly possible but quite unlikely that all 3rd party developers
will include such functionality in their players - we can only hope.  :-)

> RMS still doesn't get 'perceived volume' even.  There's an algorithm
> called ReplayGain (www.replaygain.org) that normalizes perceived
> volume and prevents output clipping (a scourge of all lossy codecs).
> It's not an 'official' part of Vorbis, at least not yet, but I think
> that at minimum we're going to push adoption of this particular
> technique, or something alot like it.  It solves a number of common
> problems, makes people happy, is simple to implement and all the
> details are public.

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