[Rhythmbox-devel] Replaygain feature suggestion

["Craig S. Kaplan" <csk cgl uwaterloo ca>]

Here's something I've been thinking about for Rhythmbox's handling
of Replaygain tags.

Currently, the player uses the album gain if it's available, and
the track gain otherwise.  I've dutifully computed both tags for
all my music files.  The downside is that when I'm playing mixes,
I still occasionally get undesirable volume changes (for example,
when the mix moves to a relatively quiet track from an album that
has a loud section).

It would be great if there were an option to prefer the track gain
tag.  Better yet, it would be very cool to decide which to use
automatically.  Basically, if it looks like you're going to be
playing a whole album, use album gain.  If you're going to be
mixing lots of albums together, use track gain.  As a first pass,
consider this:

 * If the current playlist contains tracks from only one album,
   use album gain.

 * If the current playlist enters the first track of an album,
   and shuffle isn't on, use album gain.

 * Otherwise, use track gain.

I'm sure there is extra logic necessary to switch back and forth
in response to user events.  But I wanted to suggest the basic
idea.  Any thoughts?

--
Craig S. Kaplan                         If civilization is to survive,
University of Waterloo                   it must live on the interest,
Cheriton School of Computer Science        not the capital, of nature.
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/                     -- Ronald Wright