When volume analysis for music was first introduced, the Gain and Album Gain fields were usually different (Gain being the gain for this track only, Album Gain the average gain for the entire album.) At some point, however, this changed and all my tracks show the same value for Gain and Album Gain. Is this the field (Gain) that actually affects the volume adjustment? Is this the intended behavior or has some sort of bug been introduced in calculating the values?
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I think this is intentional. The loudness levelling was changed so it follows the findings which were made by Tidal: to always use the album’s loudness where the track is sourced from.
See here for an in-depth explanation: https://productionadvice.co.uk/tidal-normalization-upgrade/
interesting link, thanks.
but that does not really explain why plex has using the same gain value for track and album.
oh, except I guess for the fact that plex now assumes there is no such thing as an individual track anymore, just albums.
That is an interesting link, and after reading that I do agree it’s probably intentional. Probably sometime during the Tidal integration, the decision was made that it would sound better always using the album gain (as pointed out in the article.) The easiest and quickest way to do that would be to change the server to write the album gain to both tags. That way no client code would need to be changed and it would be consistent with Tidals metadata (which I suspect only provides the album gain and not the track gain.) That’s merely supposition on my part, but it would make sense.
Unfortunately there are cases where I’ve merged releases in my own collection - for example having an original release as disc one and a modern remix of the same album as disc 2. I am going to need to split these up, or the gain data will be really messed up. Sadly Plex does handle two releases of the same album very well…
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nor does it well handle single tracks, nor groups of unrelated tracks in the folder (ie a mix of random tracks).
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