Replaygain and multi channel, works?

[MrSinatra]

is replaygain supposed to work with multichannel?

i ripped some 6 channel dvd stuff to m4a ALAC, and RG in winamp won't run properly on it.

i wasn't sure if its winamp blowing it, or if RG just isn't meant for multichannel period?

[Aminifu]

It appears that Winamp's RG is meant for stereo. Have you enabled the "Allow surround sound" option in the General Preferences' Playback tab?

Even so, there are various multichannel channel configurations and I'm not sure what Winamp supports (it probably just passes thru what's in the source file) and if the configurations match what the computer's sound device hardware supports. See the "Standard speaker channels" chart in the linked wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrou...surround_sound). This is why I normally use music source files that only have 1 or 2 channels; along with the WinampMatrixMixer + DirectSound plug-ins to specify how much of each content channel is played through each speaker channel in order to match up with my hardware and OS settings. It is even more complicated to get video files with multichannel sound tracks to play correctly in Winamp, so I usually use a different app for those. Even then, I can't get 'correct' playback if the video file has a different configuration and/or number of channels than what my 5.1 speaker system supports.

[MrSinatra]

Originally Posted by Aminifu

Have you enabled the "Allow surround sound" option in the General Preferences' Playback tab?

yes, as well as the allow 24bit option since these are 24 bit (and 96khz) files. winamp RG handles the 24bit/96 2channel stuff fine.

Originally Posted by Aminifu

Even so, there are various multichannel channel configurations and I'm not sure what Winamp supports (it probably just passes thru what's in the source file) and if the configurations match what the computer's sound device hardware supports.

i have no idea, but all i want to know is if RG is supposed to work on multichannel stuff in winamp or not?

in other words, does the RG standard support multichannel, yes/no?

if yes, is winamps implementation buggy then, b/c it doesn't work on these files?

[Benski]

The ReplayGain scanner tries to decode the audio to stereo when calculating. It does not always work.
I was mostly done with changing the algorithm to use the new ITU-R BS.1770-3 spec (aka EBU R128), before Nullsoft fell apart. In addition to being far more accurate in its estimation of loudness, it also has downmix matrices for calculation of multi-channel material.

There are also a lot of bugs in Winamp's multichannel playback capabilities, mostly due to differences in channel ordering between codecs and standards and Winamp's mishandling of that order.

[Aminifu]

Thanx for the info, Benski.

Any chance of the new owners hiring you to work on these features?

[MrSinatra]

Originally Posted by Aminifu

Thanx for the info, Benski.

Any chance of the new owners hiring you to work on these features?

ditto, and we can only hope!