Hello from an Amarok newbie, and thanks for a great bit of software - I'm finding it much better than the players I tried previously.

I'm using Amarok 1.4.9.1 with KDE 3.5.10 and have just installed the replaygain script (I now realise I could have just upgraded to Amarok 2 to get that functionality) and have a question about how to use the replaygain functionality. My situation is that in my office at work I listen to a lot of classical music, mostly stored as ogg files, through a set of headphones. Much of the time I find that I can't hear the quiet passages at all, and if I turn the volume up then I get deafened at the next of the louder passages even within the same album or track. Is it possible to use replaygain or some other settings to configure things such that the volume stays above a certain minimum level (i.e. so I can still hear it) yet in louder parts is kept below the level at which I'll damage my hearing? I had a fiddle with the preamp setting in replaygain but can't seem to get the output I want, and I'm not really sure if this was the real purpose of replaygain

Many Thanks

well, replaygain only alters the volume of a whole track, not parts of it. (except for clipping prevention, i think. which occurs on erroneous files).
you have got two modes to chose from: album mode or track mode.
track mode is propably what you want to use, because it makes all tracks sound equally loud. (but they can still have quiet parts). album modes makes all albums equally loud but preserves the differences in volume between the tracks of an album.
i prefer track mode myself.
replaygain is stored in audio tracks' metadata (tags). it does not alter the audio data, it depends on the player to support replaygain and apply the calculated gain to the audio when playing back the file.


especially in classical music i experienced what you are talking about, those very quiet passages.

the good news is:
i know what you need to be looking for: dynamic range compression. the dynamics are how much the volume in a songs varies. so compressing the dynamic range will bring the volume into a closer range meaning that it will sound more equally loud. you can usually vary the dynamic range compression and experiment with the settings.

the bad news is:
i don't know how to do it in linux. when i was still using windows i used a tool called besweet http://besweet.notrace.dk/ to compress the dynamic range of some movies' audio tracks. (well maybe it works in wine?) this method alters audio data in your music files! so do not delete your original files after transcoding.

wait i just had another idea:
i know that there are quite a few video/audio players out there which support dynamic range compression for AC3 and DTS tracks. but only for those formats. i suppose you won't listen to tracks in those formats
i just looked at VLC and it provides the mentioned option for AC3 and DTS. i found another option that might help you: volume normalization. this could do the trick. it let's you choose the strength. play a bit with that setting and tell me if it helps.

another thing i thought about was to use a (hard) limiter to limit the maximum volume to a certain level, but i don't know if or how this can be done.

edit: i just found a linux program that might help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelator could be doing something similar to besweet, the windows program i mentioned.

Thanks for the many suggestions. I'll have a look at those and see if any of them help, and report back

I don't think Levelator will work for me as it doesn't seem to support suitable file formats (WAV or AIFF only) and everything I have is mp3 or ogg. However, googling the term "dynamic range compression" lead me to SOX, http://sox.sourceforge.net and I think that can do what I need. The "compand" command can change the levels but will require some fiddling so I think that is a job for when I'm not at work...

Google works so much better once you know the name of the function you want!

Thanks again for the help