Feature REQ: Smartgain

[MrSinatra]

so this has been talked about in many threads, but i figured it deserved its own thread officially requested in the proper sub forum:

right now (5.666) a user can assign winamp to use either "track gain" or "album gain" or neither on playback. thats fine in so far as it goes, but its cumbersome, in that the user has to dive deep into the prefs (and know to do so) to change back n forth to fit whatever scenario is appropriate/desired.

many users, perhaps most, switch between random mixes and albums. who wants to change RG options everytime they do so? no one.

in addition, even in a random mix, a user could have 2 or more tracks appear sequentially from the same album.

the solution?

smartgain. smartgain would analyze the currently playing playlist, to determine if the currently playing song, and the next song, are sequentially increasing tracks from the same album. if not, (like in nearly all random mixes), use track gain tags; if so, (like when playing a single album in track order), use album gain tags.

this relieves the user from having to manually dive into the prefs to adjust RG, b/c it is done in a sensible way, automatically on the fly, by analyzing the playlist and being aware of what to do, and when.

[obviously, it would need to be aware of 3 tracks: last, current, next ...in order to keep track of which RG to use when. why? b/c in a random mix, if two sequential album tracks come up, when it plays the second one, it needs to stay as album gain for that second track, even though the third track would not be from the same album, and so the third track would revert to track gain]

this feature has been implemented in other software, such as Logitech's Squeezebox Server [aka SqueezeCenter / LMS].

thanks for considering to include this.

see also:

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=388527