On the internal storage on my A6 I have a playlist with different types of music files like DSD, FLAC etc. with big differences in volume levels. Is there anything I can do about leveling the volume? If there is would leveling the volume degrade the audio quality?
There is a thing that is meant to help on the matter, and it's called replay-gain. Your files have to be tagged with relevant information for the player to able to adjust the volume of each track accordingly. Alternatively, there are programs that can scan the whole of your library, and tag every single file with the relevant information. The player, though, HAS TO be able to recognise those tags, and apply the relevant changes to the audio stream BEFORE it reaches the DAC. I do not know if the Eversolo player can do so. We need help from the tech support here... A couple of things: 1. every manipulation done to the digital stream (volume attenuation, as is the case of applying replay-gain) leads to a non-bit-perfect stream. 2. the changes are subtle (in most of the cases, and if you do not have any Oasis album in your library it's even better - pun intended) and won't definitely ruin your listening experience. HTH
I may have a look for you, but: 1. what OS are you on? 2. bear in mind that some advanced PC players have that option 3. I am on Linux 4. don't even think to find an Android app and let it work directly on the Eversolo... go the PC way. 5. for replay-gain to work, the entire library needs to be scanned. And re-scanned upon album / tracks updates. 6. to keep the audio-quality loss at a minimum, chose lossless file formats: WAV, FLAC, ALAC, etc. 7. I am not sure replay gain can work on SACDs ISO-rips. It could, as well as it could not. In such a case, I suggest you extract all the ISO tracks to DSD (DSF format, which supports tagging, opposite to DFF, which does not)
Foobar2000 comes straight to mind; MusicBrainz Picard is another. There is also a command-line tool: rsgain, but I cannot tell if you can find built EXEs for Windows, or you need to compile it yourself. There could be others, but I am not very familiar with Windows; hopefully someone will chime in and suggest more.
You make it scan its files (if they are shared via SMB on the Evesolo itself)> Otherwise, you should have to bring them over to your PC / Laptop, scan them there, and put them back.
Ops. Bear in mind, that since the files need to be modified (well, their metadata will...) it may take a long time, depending on the speed of your network, your drive, the number of tracks, etc. etc. If that's the case, then you may try to copy them on a n external drive, use it on your laptop, and then copy the files back.
It would be interesting to see the results, their timing (also how many tracks were involved, of course), and how it performs (are the tags being interpreted correctly by the Eversolo? all of them, some of them?) This could help both the community here, and the devs, shall they decide to look into what's missing, if that was the case. One detail: replay-gain has 2 (two) modes of operation: 1. "file" mode: all tracks are played back at the same apparent / perceived loudness 2. "album" mode: all the tracks are played back at the same apparent / perceived loudness, BUT within one album, all the tracks are played back within a relative volume diapason; so that you can still perceive the difference intended by the author between the louder and the quieter ones. AT LEAST this is what MPD (MusicPlayerDaemon DOES in Linux; and I believe this IS THE CORRECT behavior. YMMV, of course, depending on tools and players involved.
So I have about 50 downloaded albums in different formats like SACD/DSD and hi-resolution FLACS and even some WAV files on my PC. I just copy pasted the best songs from each album onto a playlist and transferred that playlist to the internal SSD on my Eversolo. I still need to rename the songs in order to get some kind of descent order in the playlist but for the most part it's playing fine except for the big difference in volume levels. I haven't used Foobar in a long time but I'm going to try to see what happens.
1. the path is ALWAYS relative to where, on your device, the files are. YMMV 2. problems with volume levels are the normality: they depend on HOW the CD was matered (that is: a replay-gain scan COULD solve the issue) Once Foobar2000 can see your files, it will most probably tag them correctly. Anyway, my suggestion is: Give it a try with a SMALL SUBSET of your library, say 5 artists, and 2/3 albums each... it's easier to check and verify whether replay-gain works in bot Foobar2000 AND the Eversolo device...
Ok, I'm going to try this weekend. One more question: I know you can set favorites from internal files on the screen but can't find that option on the app. Is that correct,?
Cannot help on this, sorry. I seem to remember somebody had encountered the same issue, and the option was somewhere else in the menu structure; I cannot remember more.
Do not attempt to add replay gain tags to your music before first making a full backup of all your files. It’s very easy for it to go wrong and your left with corrupted files. Dbpoweramp suite of tools perfecttunes is a good tool to batch analyse and add replaygain this can run on Mac or Windows. MusicBrainz Picard can also do it but you need to install an extension in the app to do it and it’s not an app I would advice to a novice as you can easily destroy your metadata. Never used Foobar so can’t vouch for it. The Eversolo player does recognise replay gain tags you have to switch it on in the settings though. Don’t expect volume levelling to be a complete solution you will still find differences that are quite extreme between material. Nothing can cope with differences in dynamic range which is apparent in most modern recordings where things have little headroom and pushed to almost clipping and heavily compressed, these will still sound much louder than older recordings and masters that will be lower and have overall more dynamic range. Volume levelling helps the battle against the loudness wars but is not a complete victory, nothing is I am afraid. With volume levelling you will see an overall reduction in output volume as it will attempt to match the loudness of each album to peak at -18bfs in some cases you will see a reduction in output of more than -12db so if your using the DMP as a preamp in some cases it might reduce it down to much to drive your power amp to higher volumes.
As a long time squeezebox user, I use replaygain successfully on internally stored files. I use Foobar2000 to scan all tracks as one album, which sets the volume of all tracks at the level of the quietest track in your collection. You'll need to set replaygain->"track gain" on in Eversolo audio settings. This method is ideal for play lists, random mix or "play at will", as Eversolo calls it. I would like Eversolo to introduce "smart gain" - a supported Squeezbox feature. "Smart gain" ignores the replaygain tags when playing an album, so that you don't miss out on the album sound engineer's intended dynamic range. I've never seen the point of album gain. It's also worth noting that using Foobar2000 to modify the replaygain tags does not mess with the integrity of the recording itself.
That isn’t how smartgain works or how replaygain should work. It’s done per album not against all albums you have. Replaygain if calculated correctly has two values album gain and track gain. These are measured to match the overall loudness to the target LUFs value normally -18dbfs. For album gain it does an average across all tracks so only produces one level to reduce it by, so each track will use the same value so volume doesn’t vary during the album but it’s still reduced. This has no affect on dynamic range it’s just a volume reduction. Dynamic range cannot be altered by volume that’s compression that causes lack of dynamic range. Track replaygain value is for the track to match to the LUFs target on its own each track on an album will have a different track gain value. Smartgain allows the player to choose which gain setting to apply based on track context, so If you queue up an album it uses Album gain, if it’s a track in a random playlist or played solo it will use its track gain value.
