Flac - Jun 2005 - Playback + Replay Gain questions

I'm hoping to set up a headless system to playback my audio once I get back
home after an extended leave.  Ideally I'd just ssh in and use a curses
based player to play back FLACs and mp3s.  This leads me to a few quesitons:
	1.  What is the minimun processor speed needed to decode and play flac files? 
I have an old P100 I would like to use for the task if it is sufficient.
	2.  When using replay-gain option is there any way to have it adjust for a
whole album or is it strictly computed on a track for track basis?  Furthermore
will decoding the FLAC file discard the replay-gain info?
	3.  Does anybody know of a good curses player for flac and mp3?  What about
volume differences?  I remember having to boost the preamp setting in xmms quite
a bit.  I'd rather not have to fiddle when lifting rocks or shearing sheep
or anything.
	Thanks for any assistance!

--- CE <ce7@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> 	I'm hoping to set up a headless system to playback my audio once I
> get back home after an extended leave.  Ideally I'd just ssh in and
> use a curses based player to play back FLACs and mp3s.  This leads me
> to a few quesitons:
> 	1.  What is the minimun processor speed needed to decode and play
> flac files?  I have an old P100 I would like to use for the task if
> it is sufficient.
that would probably be ok.  if you turn on replaygain synthesis
or you have other effects in the processing chain then it might
get close and OS overhead could be a factor.
> 	2.  When using replay-gain option is there any way to have it adjust
> for a whole album or is it strictly computed on a track for track
> basis?  Furthermore will decoding the FLAC file discard the
> replay-gain info?
there are two tags for replaygain, the 'album' tag which applies
to the whole album, and 'track' tag for each track.

if you are using a single FLAC file per CD they will be the same
though.

the FLAC decoder does not use replaygain because it is not
lossless.  if you are using the flac binary and piping the output
somewhere there is an undocumented option for applying replaygain.
> 	3.  Does anybody know of a good curses player for flac and mp3? 
check http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#software
> What about volume differences?  I remember having to boost the preamp
> setting in xmms quite a bit.  I'd rather not have to fiddle when
> lifting rocks or shearing sheep or anything.
depends on what player you use.  the flac option for applying
replaygain has a preamp setting.

Josh



		
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Thanks!  You've been most informative.  Do the command line options vary for
album and track or is the album gain computed automatically if it's done on
a batch of files?


You Wrote:
> 
> there are two tags for replaygain, the 'album' tag which applies
> to the whole album, and 'track' tag for each track.