Comments on: Normalizing your MP3 collection with mp3gain

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 01:25:55 +0000

Oh just one more thing. For those who say that vorbisgain has a “-r” switch eliminatinf\g the need for find completely, it will only work if your collection is comprised of oggs only. It will choke (and quit) on the first non-ogg/vorbis file it sees.

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:37:37 +0000

The comments are moderated, so I have to approve them before they will show

I realised that as soon as I submitted it with firefox. I immediately got some feedback from the site that my comment was awaiting approval. With Opera I got nothing at all… And yes I have cookies enabled (but they are deleted when I shut opera down). That’s where my confusion sprang from.

By: Porges

Porges — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:51:42 +0000

The comments are moderated, so I have to approve them before they will show

Thanks for pointing that out. The find manpage makes it seem like this is what should happen…

Given this structure:

dir1/
    file1.mp3
    file2.mp3
dir3/
    file3.mp3
    file4.mp3

… with ‘;’ the command is executed once for every file, and with ‘+’ the command is executed on "file1.mp3 file2.mp3" and then "file3.mp3 file4.mp3".

Whereas, as you say, the change seems to do nothing!

Edit: After more research, it seems that this is partly a bug in findutils, and partly a misunderstanding of the ‘+’ modifier. It doesn’t guarantee that all files in the directories will be collected, and currently performs the exact same task as ‘;’!

By: Adam

Adam — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:04:56 +0000

I’ll try resubmitting the comment now that I know what the problem is.

Porges, your trackwise replaygain command will work fine but the album-based method will not do what you expect it to. In fact, it will do the exact same thing the trackwise command will. John’s for-loop command will work if there are no spaces in the file or directory names. Otherwise it will fail — or at least it did for me. After much mucking around, the following command did it for me:

find . -type d | while read i; do mp3gain -a -k "$i"/*.mp3 ; done

Basically what it does it run mp3gain on EVERY subdirectory but only on the *.mp3 files contained therein. This is necessary because mp3gain will not accept a directory as an argument (unlike vorbisgain). The “read” command is there to handle spaces in directory and file names. The equivalent command for vorbisgain is:

find . -type d -execdir vorbisgain -a -f {} +

By: Porges

Porges — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:19:22 +0000

Mike: Check out the ‘find’ man page; you can use “-execdir … ;” which runs the command one file at a time, or “-execdir … +”, runs the command on all files in a directory at once.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 05:38:24 +0000

I’m curious what the ‘+’ in the album command does? I think I understand all the rest of the command, and the -a is fairly easy to guess, but the change from ‘\;’ to ‘+’ is a mystery to me.

By: apt-get install mp3gain | apt-get install

apt-get install mp3gain | apt-get install — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 22:26:12 +0000

[...] replaygain, and found a link to mp3gain. Once that was installed, I then modified instructions from porg.es as [...]

By: John

John — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 17:32:23 +0000

I just use:

for file in `find . -type f | grep mp3`; do mp3gain -q -k -p -r “$file”; done

By: Fird

Fird — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 09:31:55 +0000

Thank you for your guide It really helps!

By: Carthik

Carthik — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 03:44:24 +0000

Thank you. I have added a link to this article for those who might be interested in your way of doing things.

By: Normalize the Gain (Playback Volume) of your MP3s « Ubuntu Blog

Normalize the Gain (Playback Volume) of your MP3s « Ubuntu Blog — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 03:44:17 +0000

[...] Edit: for an alternative command, with explanation, and a way to use album-gain for songs from albums, visit porges The following command, executed from the directory where I store my music normalized all the files in my collection: $find . -type f -iname ‘*.mp3′ -print0 | xargs -0 mp3gain -r -k [...]