MediaMonkey forum

Hi,

I see in the auto-conversion options the ability to do "level volume when synchronizing". My music is stored as a mix of flac and mp3. On my PC everything has a gain value stored with it. When loading music to my iPhone I wanted to do the same thing. It looks like all the mp3 tracks maintain their gain values when being copied to the iPhone but none of the flac songs that have been converted maintain their values. Is there a way to get the value to be placed into the track? Or do you think I should just use "level volume" in this case since I'm already recoding the track to a different format anyway...

Thanks for any info or opinions on the matter!

Brad

PS. If I attempt to check the "Level volume when synchronizing" box then it pops up a warning message saying this is not recommended since my player supports Replay Gain. So right now I have a mix of tracks with a gain value stored in them (the native mp3 tracks) and tracks with no gain (flac converted to m4a). So is there a way to get the flac -> m4a process to store a gain value, or should I just do "level volume" for everything?

Since nobody has replied I tried clicking the box to level all the music, i.e. going against the warning message. However, even this does not appear to work correctly. I expected that every song on the device would be replaced after clicking the button to synchronize, but that was not the case. It doesn't look like it did anything. I even deleted a big block of songs from the device and then did a sync. Based on the speed it was copying them to the device it does not appear that any of them were being re-coded to do the leveling. So I would conclude this feature is not working at all.

PLEASE HELP!!!! I paid money for this feature and it doesn't seem to work properly. Thanks.

Thank you for filing a bug to resolve this issue. I hope I don't have to wait a long time for the fix!

http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=7601

Here's my summary of how I *think* MediaMonkey functions right now. (I did some testing by making copies of files and using different formats and sync options.)

When synchronizing with the "level volume" option for auto-conversion
* FLAC -> m4a appears to correctly level the volume in the process
* If you select "level volume" after a song is already on the iPhone you need to manually delete the song and re-sync in order for volume leveling to occur
* For "native" songs such as mp3's that contain a track gain, it appears that MediaMonkey does NOT level the volume, but instead keeps the track gain value in tact. So as long as ReplyGain is enabled on my iPhone this actually works as I would like it to work.

When synchronizing with the "level volume" option NOT checked
* FLAC -> m4a loses the gain value and it does not level volume (as expected)
* Transferring tracks natively maintains the gain value

So bottom line for MM3 users:
* The best option to use is to click the "level volume" box in the auto-conversion options.
* If you previously had the box unchecked you will need to delete all files without a track gain value, set the "level volume" option, and then re-sync. They will still appear with no track gain value, but this time they should be leveled already.

If this thread helps you, please reply! Then I'll at least know I wasn't wasting my time typing all this info into a thread!

I've noticed the same thing with Mediamonkey 3.2.4 syncing to iOS 4.2.1 on my iPod. In my case, I'm converting FLAC to mp3. I have taken to occasionally wiping the iPod and re-converting the entire library again. This takes a really long time, but it will end up converting the files with the tags intact.

I noticed the bug was closed because it was tested in MM4 with no issue found. I wonder if they tested the "re-sync" condition which seems to cause problems for the tags. Has anyone upgraded to MM4 and verified that it works properly?

ethan3000 wrote: I noticed the bug was closed because it was tested in MM4 with no issue found. I wonder if they tested the "re-sync" condition which seems to cause problems for the tags. Has anyone upgraded to MM4 and verified that it works properly?

Yes, this problem bothered me in MM3 (I reported the bug) and now it is definitely working as expected in MM4.

Well, I upgraded to MediaMonkey 4 (build 1424) and tried syncing to my iPod Touch. Upon first sync, it works fine. But, I'm still seeing converted FLAC tracks showing up without volume tags on following syncs. It looks like it is all tracks that I've recently played. Anyone else seeing this?

This bug (or a new one) is definitely in MM4. To make matters worse, there is a leveling (SoundCheck) bug on the iphone where the leveling gets ignored if you hit 'skip'. Hitting 'back' sometimes gets it to kick in again.
With MM4 sync there seems to be a meta data issue in general. Album art, ratings, leveling all get blanked or out of sync. I hook up and resync at the end of each day and if I've changed some ratings on the device, that's when the trouble starts to happen. I've tried running iTunes sycnc before, after and not at all to see if there was any infleunce. I think there is influence on the problem but it is so inconsistent I cannot determine the pattern. Hard to fix a slippery test case.
It is driving me crazy though.

You can try to create a debug log (step 4b) and send it to support: http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=69