Subject: Re: [codec] draft-ietf-codec-oggopus and "album" gain

From: John Ridges <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 13:43:25 -0600

On 9/8/2014 1:00 PM, [email-masked] wrote:
> I would be entirely happy if it was recommended that R128 gain values were
> stored in their tags and not normally in the output gain field, but I've felt
> resistance to that idea before.  The spec itself advised the opposite and
> explained the reason: everyone will apply the output gain, not everyone will
> apply the tag gain.
>
> Do we agree about this?  Might be best to wait for some other comments.
>
> --ian

It seems to me that the gain values are intended for two different 
audiences. The output gain should be something set by the audio 
producer, whereas the R128 gains are something usually set by the audio 
consumers (to normalize all the songs in a playlist to be the same 
loudness, for example). Naturally the output gain must be mandatory for 
a player, but I would vote that it makes sense that the R128 gains are 
optional, since only the consumer would really know why they are 
applying the R128 gains to begin with (and if it's a matter of an audio 
producer trying to get the same loudness for all the songs in his 
"album", and he can't fix the source material and re-encode it, then he 
should be using the output gain for this purpose). My two cents.

John Ridges