replaygain

ReplayGain weights the energy by frequency to better match perceived loudness, and it does a reasonably good job.

It may be that they've done simple loudness normalisation instead of one of the more preferable, advanced techniques, like ReplayGain 1.0, R128, or BS.1770 (/ReplayGain 2.0)?

It has some optional compiled dependencies for features like ReplayGain that may not work on ARM, however.

For me it was foobar2000 because it supported Unicode and ReplayGain looooong before Winamp.

You have to manage replaygain scanning yourself, and if you have audio that does not support APEv2 tags you're shit out of luck.

Actually what you said about mpd replaygain support is wrong.

One thing I found annoying was that it could not add replaygain for flac.

MPD does no replaygain scanning and only understands APEv2 tags.

Without replaygain your loud songs have a small dynamic range and your quiet songs have a large dynamic range most of which is below the noise floor.

With replaygain your loud songs have the same dynamic range, your quiet songs have the same dynamic range, but a larger proportion of the latter is above the noise floor, meaning you've effectively increased the dynamic range.

FB2K has had excellent ReplayGain support for as long as I can remember.

Applying Replaygain or EBU R128 loudness equalization will not change the perception of dynamic range and, all other things being equal will actually slightly decrease the DR rating.

To get around this, install metaflac and execute the following: find somealbum-with-cds -type f -name "*.flac" -print0 | xargs -0 metaflac --add-replay-gain Then import as normal and it will have replaygain included (and store the replaygain in the library).

If "standards of 1998" means proper parsing and display of metadata in various character sets from various sources (local file, internet streams etc), wide input format support, gapless playback and Replaygain support, relatively low resource usage, instantaneous search and unrestricted customizability then I wished more music players followed them.

And TFA is not talking about Replaygain-like algorithms from the description.