Help, please: Will Apple Music work the way I want it to? Smart Playlists, MP3Gain, integration

[jordanneo]

I've been a long-time user of iTunes with over 43,000 tracks in my existing library. I would love to start using an Apple Music subscription and adding albums to my library instead of buying the albums individually. My hope is to integrate the new albums from Apple Music with my existing library.

I do most of my listening via smart playlists (randomized playlists combining my favourite rated tunes, with newly acquired music, with music I haven't listened to in a long time, etc.) and would like to have the Apple Music albums that I add to my library integrated into that smart playlist approach as I do for the rest of my library, including ratings. Is anyone doing this successfully?

My hesitation to jump in and try the 3-month Apple Music trial is based on the stories I read on-line about people's libraries being corrupted, songs replaced with incorrect versions, tags being changed, etc. I'm seeking some experiences from the community on whether Apple Music is usable as I've described above, if I should wait it out for a few more months before trying Apple Music, or if I should just give up on trying to integrate.

My other issue is that my entire library is volume-levelled using MP3Gain. I'm assuming that I will have to "undo gain changes" for all my existing tunes and then apply Sound Check to get some level of volume consistency across my library and Apple Music. Does anyone have any experience with this scenario that might be helpful.

Thanks for reading and for your help.

J

 

[Rigby]

My other issue is that my entire library is volume-levelled using MP3Gain. I'm assuming that I will have to "undo gain changes" for all my existing tunes and then apply Sound Check to get some level of volume consistency across my library and Apple Music. Does anyone have any experience with this scenario that might be helpful.

Sound Check ignores the ReplayGain tags added by MP3Gain (it uses its own proprietary iTunNORM tag). So you don't have to undo the changes applied by MP3Gain. There are even some scripts/utilities out there to convert ReplayGain to iTunNORM tags, which would carry over your normalization to Sound Check (otherwise iTunes will compute new replay gain values).

 

[jordanneo]

Thanks Rigby. Maybe I'm missing something or I wasn't specific enough. I ran my music files through MP3Gain before loading to iTunes, so they're all album normalized to 89 db. Sound Check is off in my iTunes.

Unless I'm mistaken, music from Apple Music will be more like 99 db and if I try to apply Sound Check on top of Replay Gain I believe it makes a bit of a mess of things. If I convert my Replay Gain tags to iTunNORM tags, will Sound Check normalize Apple Music songs down to 89 db?

Back in the day, there was lots of talk of Replay Gain being so much better than Sound Check. Has Sound Check improved at all? Does it adjust for albums or just songs?

Thanks again,

J

 

[Rigby]

Unless I'm mistaken, music from Apple Music will be more like 99 db and if I try to apply Sound Check on top of Replay Gain I believe it makes a bit of a mess of things.

No, the replay gain tags added by MP3Gain have no effect when playing back in iTunes.

I don't know what gain Apple Music uses.

If I convert my Replay Gain tags to iTunNORM tags, will Sound Check normalize Apple Music songs down to 89 db?

Yes. Alternatively, you could just try letting iTunes compute a new replay gain by simply turning on Sound Check. One would assume it applies the same loudness metrics that were used to normalize Apple Music songs (but I don't know that for sure).

Back in the day, there was lots of talk of Replay Gain being so much better than Sound Check. Has Sound Check improved at all? Does it adjust for albums or just songs?

It works fine. It's not a matter of replay gain vs sound check (they do the same thing just with different tags), but of the software that is used to compute the gain. Supposedly iTunes can do album gain now:

See: http://productionadvice.co.uk/sound-check-album-mode/