[pssturges]

Hi All,

I largely listen to my music in one of 2 ways. On my iPod classic or XBMC. I prefer using lossless formats so much of my library is now ALAC.

I am trying to get my head around how normalisation works for ALAC and specifically with XBMC. I had previously used mp3gain to normalise my mp3 collection. This worked great in all situations including XBMC. Now having converted much of my collection to ALAC, things don't seem quite so simple. My understanding is that most other formats use a replaygain tag to store the normalising data, and XBMC uses this for playback. It is also my understanding that ALAC does not support replaygain tags, but instead uses a tag call iTunesNorm and XBMC does not support this.

I use a program called iVolume to normalise my ALAC files. I believe it uses the replaygain algorithm to set the iTunesNorm tag. Works great for i devices but doesn't seem to be any use for XBMC.

So assuming my understanding is correct (and I'm far from certain it is), in the absence of any other reasonable method of normalised playback, would it be feasible for XBMC to introduce support for iTunesNorm tag in ALAC?

Or should I be looking at other methods of achieving this? Happy to hear from anyone who can shed any light on this.

Thanks