[Android] ReplayGain (its important!)

[juliank at i2pmail.org]

Hello Dear Team at VideoLAN,

Below is a message that I tried to send a while ago but was unable, due to the fact that I was not yet in the mailing list. 

VLC is great and it gives great pleasure to see it continually improve over the years.

Sadly, logging-in to my user account at your Git repository website has not been successful.

A "thumbs up" needs to be given to the issue related to adding the ReplayGain feature, here:
https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc-android/-/issues/1241

In addition to offering a possible, thumbs up, please add the following info to the ticket, from Julian K.

"ReplayGain is a very useful feature that ought to be implemented for the Android version. Upon implementation, this feature would be worthy of inclusion on the main feature list, in the same breath as the equalizer.

The above Wikipedia article shared by @rugk says:
"VLC media player, multiplatform. Reads ReplayGain metadata natively"

Does this mean that VLC **only** reads the ReplayGain metadata produced by VLC? Will it not read ReplayGain data produced by another program from a bygone era, for example, Winamp? If so this is problematic, and it would be desirable for VLC to respond to a user's established library.

Similarly, is there a problem of different "headroom"s between different players (see the above Wikipedia article about "headrooms"). If so, VLC, upon parsing the music files for the first time, might list any files with "opposing (or no) ReplayGain values that may result in uncomfortable changes in volume between tracks". It might ask the user if they would prefer to calculate or re-calculate ReplayGain for such tracks.

Even with the above process, it might still be desirable to calculate the ReplayGain for a (user-defined) selection of tracks. As the replay gain values are calculated an option screen would list each of the processed audio tracks (processing video might be disabled by default) and how to record the meta data to the file. Ie. Save: "Album Gain", "Track Gain", or "Both".

It may be prudent for "Album Gain" to be the default ReplayGain method, unless the user selects "Track Gain" in Settings.

END OF FEEDBACK

Sorry for the inconvenience involved in copy/pasting this message into the ticket.

Hopefully my login attempts will be successful in future, as I'm now able to provide input toward various aspects of the project.

With great thanks and appreciation,
Julian K