Queries about "compilation" tag and AlbumGain

[twinspex]

Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask. This is quite possible not anything to do with QAAC but may be to do with Quick Time.
In single file mode qaac -help indicates --compilation is available for tagging. I'm not sure how to use this field.
Do you need to supply a value? e.g. --compilation="true" or --compilation="false", or do you supply a boolean value TRUE or FALSE e.g. 0, -1, or is the presence or absence of a compilation tag alone without an associated value the way to use it?

The second query is to do with where QAAC picks up albumgain tags from. Essentially does qaac or the qucktime dlls have the internal facility to perform replay/album gain scan and tagging on submitted files?

I have been producing my own batch files following the example of the REACT2 coding, and trying to extend that into the use of qaac in my batch files to create m4a files. In REACT2 when the object is to produce a single album image wavegain is used to obtain album related ReplayGain values and to place them as REM statements in an EAC generated cuesheet. When I feed such a cuesheet into QAAC does it pick up these values from the cuesheet if they are present or does it automatically generate its own values for the tags by scanning the wave or flac input file? The albumgain values do appear as tags in the output m4a file when an album wave file and cuesheet are used to generate it.

If I want to encode a collection of untagged individual track wave or flac files without a cuesheet to lossy m4a files using qaac, is there a way to get qaac to analyse the files as a group and tag each file with the albumgain tags, or is it best to use qaac to encode and tag each file individually and then use aacgain on the transcoded files as a group to generate album gain tags? Obviously if qaac (or quicktime dlls) do not have the internal facility to generate album gain tags then the second suggestion above is the way I should go.

Thank you for your very rapid responses to previous queries. You have been very helpful.

I am currently using Windows XP SP3 and qaac 0.25a with Quicktime 7.6.8.

Regards,
Twinspex

[nu774]

In single file mode qaac -help indicates --compilation is available for tagging. I'm not sure how to use this field.
Do you need to supply a value? e.g. --compilation="true" or --compilation="false", or do you supply a boolean value TRUE or FALSE e.g. 0, -1, or is the presence or absence of a compilation tag alone without an associated value the way to use it?

"--compilation" takes no argument. When you specify this option, compilation tag is created and the value is set to 1.

If you don't know the meaning of the compilation tag, google "iTunes compilcation".
This tag is used by iTunes to group multiple artists album.

However, I (personally) don't use this at all. Many people just use "Album Artists" for that purpose. Now iTunes also supports grouping with "Album Artists", therefore I doubt this tag is still in use.

The second query is to do with where QAAC picks up albumgain tags from. >Essentially does qaac or the qucktime dlls have the internal facility to perform replay/album gain scan and tagging on submitted files?

No.

qaac / QuickTime doesn't do that job. iTunes has a feature called "Sound Check", which is like replay gain, but a different monster.
qaac also ignores replay gain tags in the original source file (if present).

This is intended, because gain might be slightly different after the encoding.