Gatefold 1.2.0

[1.2.0] — volume levelling, album details

Volume levelling — Settings → Volume levelling: one switch, and every album plays as loud as the next while keeping its own quiet and loud moments. A quiet interlude stays quiet: by default the gain is the album's, measured over the whole album at once, never the track's own.

• How it levels: by album (default), «smart» (by album when an album plays in order, by track in shuffle) or each track.
• Target loudness: −18 LUFS (ReplayGain 2.0 standard), −16 (like Apple Music), −14 (like Spotify and YouTube) or −23 (like radio and TV). Above −18 the preamp adds gain, and clipping prevention keeps very dynamic albums below the target rather than distorting them.
• The levelling is foobar2000's own ReplayGain: sample-exact, gapless, with clipping prevention by the stored peaks. Gatefold sets it up, and puts foobar2000's previous ReplayGain settings back when levelling is turned off.
• Tracks without ReplayGain values are measured in the background, the way the ReplayGain 2.0 scanner measures them: EBU R128 / ITU-R BS.1770-4 loudness with both gates, true peak by 4× oversampling, mono as dual mono, LFE left out. It runs in a worker, gives way to what you are doing and pauses on battery. The standard REPLAYGAIN_* tags are written and read back to check them; the audio is never touched.
• Albums are found the careful way: album tag + album folder (CD1 / Disc 2 sub-folders belong to one album), one title by two album artists in one folder stays two albums, and a compilation stays one.
• An album missing an album gain on any of its tracks is measured again as a whole. Otherwise foobar2000 would fall back to that track's own gain, and the interlude would jump up.
• The album you are listening to comes first: its playing track is measured before anything else and its tags are written at once, so the following tracks play levelled; when playback moves to another album that is still waiting, that album jumps to the front of the queue. Nothing is written in the last seconds before a track change.
• Opus files get R128_TRACK_GAIN / R128_ALBUM_GAIN (their own standard, RFC 7845) next to the REPLAYGAIN_* fields. The status line counts only the albums that still lack values and names any format whose files do not keep them.
• Fast: several tracks are measured side by side in workers while foobar2000's decoder is kept busy without a break (about as fast as foobar2000 can decode). Only while you are using the computer does it slow down to one track at a time.

Album details, on request. An album page stays as it was until you ask for more: the «Details» button, a click on the track count, or the I key (remembered). Then:

• A card fills the empty right side of the header with what the album actually has: format (FLAC 24/96), bitrate, size, loudness (LUFS, from ReplayGain), dynamic range (foo_dr_meter), plays and the last one, date added (foo_playcount), release date, label and catalogue number, genres, discs, and the folder (a click opens it).
• The track list gains columns: format, bitrate, loudness, DR and plays — only the ones this album has values for, and without the artist column when every track is by the album artist.
• It fits any window: the card narrows to two columns, then becomes one line under a smaller cover, so the track list always keeps its room.

VU meters read what you hear. The live stream comes before ReplayGain, so the meters now apply the gain foobar2000 applies to the playing track (the same rules: source, preamp, clipping prevention). A new default for 0 VU, «Auto», measures the level of the album that is playing from the very signal the meter shows (a gated running mean: quick to follow a louder stretch, slow to follow a quieter one), so the needle swings around −6 VU and reaches the red only on the loudest moments — on a loud modern master and a quiet old record alike, with or without tags. Hover the meter to see what 0 VU stands for right now. The fixed −18 / −14 / −10 dBFS references are still there.

Bundled: foobar2000 2.26.1 (official unmodified installer) · foo_ui_webview2 v2.0.0 · WebView2 bootstrapper

SHA-256 — see SHA256SUMS.txt. Bundled third-party checksums:

5272e5755b8e65bf389d46e5c37f60db188706e6570ef4da14f4367e3e6d6092  foo_ui_webview2-2.0.0.fb2k-component
72fe15a88b085ee4e49d68114e2bb9655000c2e0fdf40dcc128bbef8bcaf3600  foobar2000-x64_v2.26.1.exe
f414de01c4680f0bb0694d1ea7803c6968f3a81bf6bad01b89bfc65dce14c2a2  MicrosoftEdgeWebview2Setup.exe