Developer(s) Glen Sawyer Operating system | Written in C | |
Stable release 1.2.5 (August 4, 2010; 6 years ago (2010-08-04)) [±] Preview release 1.3.5 (not yet to be found) [±] Available in English, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Uzbek | ||
MP3Gain is an audio normalization software tool. The tool is available on multiple platforms and is free software. It analyzes the MP3 and reversibly changes its volume. The volume can be adjusted for single files or as album where all files would have the same perceived loudness. It is an implementation of ReplayGain. In 2015 Debian and Ubuntu removed it from their repositories due to a lack of an active maintainer.
Contents
Technical details
MP3Gain first computes the desired gain (volume adjustment), either per track or per album, using the ReplayGain algorithm. It then modifies the overall volume scale factor in each MP3 frame, and writes undo information as a tag (in APEv2, or ID3v2 format) making this a reversible process. The scale factor modification can be reversed using the information in the added tag and the tag may be removed. MP3Gain does not introduce any digital generation loss because it does not decode and re-encode the file.
AAC/MP4 instead of MP3
MP3Gain is unable to change the volume on AAC/MP4 files. A mod called AACGain exists that can be used as drop-in replacement in most frontends originally created for MP3Gain, yet the AAC audio file must be AAC inside MP4 container format and not raw AAC data.