Z Review - MUSIC (Loudness War, Dynamic Range + Recording Qualities) 

Awesome! Great explanation. Its unfortunate where the music industry has gone. A good example is Metallica... All of their old stuff is recorded great. The new stuff.... Loud as shit...

Confused sniper is trying to kill your laptop. :D

I wish I could like the video twice just because you mentioned Hans Zimmer.

I have no idea how to add this to my foobar... Shit...

Awesome video! Shame it has so few views! People need to wake up and realize that music, and I mean real music, is the victim here... It's unfortunately not only pop and rap/R'n'B that are affected it's all genre's. Compressed DR is awful sounding and very fatiguing on anything better than a cheap radio or BT speaker... Thankfully radio stations have their own DR compressors, so the music industry can leave the recording untouched and people can decide if they want it louder or not!

Wow man, had no idea this got so bad, read an article like 8 years ago, but to see the graphic going brick wall, damn. Also, like someone said in a past video, you deserve more views :D, will tell friends about the channel :D

This is the reason I think any audio player that doesn't support replaygain, is unusable for listening music on. On Linux I use Deadbeef, which is pretty much like Foobar, but open source and on Linux.

You may have updated your knowledge since this video, but I'll leave this here anyway: 3 dB is waay more than the minimum loudness increment that the human ear can detect. According to the 2005 study "Sensitivity to Changes in the Intensity of White Noise and Its Relation to Masking and Loudness" (The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America) the minimum is more like 0.41 dB. I've tested myself with an online tool using pure tones and I can detect loudness changes of 0.5 dB correctly about 70% of the time if every attempt is a guess between "constant loudness", "loudness went up mid-sample" and "loudness went down mid-sample" (one should get 33% right if one were just guessing randomly).

And I thought **I** have an omni-preference when it comes to genre. =P If it was well-made by people who cared, I'll watch/listen/play just about anything; Puyo Puyo Tetris to Dead Space and everything in between. Just don't fuck with it.

If you have RG data to know how off levels are. Why not to use software volume normalisation to set volume to 0db track to track and forget about amplifier volume knob?

I was expecting this to be a war about the "loudness" function on a stereo receiver.

That is a crude measurement , for that kind of measurement i have dedicated pro tools Nugen Audio VisLM2 since iwork with sound , but you can see the compressor there , the str8 line means that it is compressed , doesn't matter the level . And that is Brick Wall Limiter i know which one it is , its WAVES ULTRAMAXSIAZER , comes in few flavors , that is the killer of good sound ,and producers know that but they are forced to do that , im amassed mister Z knows this , or he red it somewhere and made a video about it .Good work . Crude measurement but still, if you want Try NUGEN , it gives you a lot more information . Im not advertising anything i have WAVES Analyzer doing the same thing . But really Electronic music suffers from this a lot , almost every track ,so im forced in to CLASSICAL

this saddens me :'(

Good overview. I have noticed that recent "digital downloads" of music have the gain reduced by 1 dB, sometimes up to 2.7 dB, in order to satisfy complaints about clipping and technicality of true peak clipping. The ReplayGain looks better by this amount, and it is not easy to read and subtract in the head the floating-point peak value from it. For example, Metallica, Death Magnetic web and Mfit releases peak at 2.7 to 2.0 dB, and there is unused range above it. The whole album reads -8 on RG, but it is effectively -10. You can also use the Dynamic Range DR meter, which does subtract the peak level in the calculation, to produce a useful statistic. I think the "More Ghosts and Stuff" also has unused range. I saw one peak at the start of the track approaching maximum. The peak statistic isn't that important in my opinion. You can have a few peak shoot up, possibly because of a quantization error (in mp3). The low peak tracks could still have louder tracks on the album for macro-dynamics. The Opus codec ignores the peak completely. In movies loud pop music seems to sound better, because fragments of it are mixed with action, and the viewer is moved by the story and visual images with good range and space. For example Stargate Atlantis episode "Vegas" has loud heavy metal and Johnny Cash music. I got the Cash album, and I thought it sounded bad (apart from compression it has distorted sibilance and watery quality) and much worse than in the movie. Strange how professional sound engineers tend to ignore ReplayGain. They talk of loudness normalization as a recent innovation: "Apple created sound check" "Streaming services X and Y added it". They also praise Apple for bringing AAC. Developers of Hydrogen Audio created ReplayGain in 2001 and Mr. Frank Klemm also provided with the earliest quality lossy codec Musepack, first to include loudness normalization in the core standard.

Damn this is good sh!t.

Hi Zeos Do you usually apply track or album gain or are you always going for complete bit perfect playback ?

I was in the mood to puke and didn''t know how to do it in 2 min. Thx for the sea sickness, Z :D

Love this video. Thanks for breaking. Keep up the great work.

Zeos! Brother, thank you even after 5 years.... Awesome!

Wow - this explained so many things. Thank you!

I've added the RG columns but they don't return any values, just "?". Where does foobar get those values from? The internet or the file itself?

Zeos do you ever use the volume leveling features of foobar? if not can you give a short reason why? Thanks

Is more bitrate better?

Using DSD and SACD recordings is a good way to avoid compressed recordings. Usually SACDs enjoy much better masters (even post 1990, 2000 or even 2010). You should look into that.

Is it possible that I could download your Foobar setup/theme? Or can you not do that?