Hello, yes I think so too… Just as an option. What I told Serato Traktor and others doing also. And it have nothing to do with a missing gain knob. I think it’s also question of genres you play. I don’t need a 100% normalization I will be happy if the songs that bear double so loud are close to the silent ones. I play hip hop and many other stuff out of different decades a wild mix of different production times and this will be very helpfully to make a good and fast mix.
I was just going to say with quick mixing autogain is a nice feature.
I use it all the time in Serato.
I think there is an assumption that everyone plays 12" inches 8 mins long records with enough time to make long blends whilst babying the tracks etc. There is nothing wrong with that.
In one minute I can play 3 or 4 tracks, one hook, one verse, one hook, …that may not seem like djing to the purist but the club is jumping…That’s quick mixing hip hop style peak hour.
I understand all the pros and cons to this feature, but I still think your music database always needs to be prepared. Each and every song, cut, sample etc.
Normalization? Okay, I could get that. Why not. Let Engine scan the track for loudest peak and lift that to digital max.
Simple auto gain? Be my guest, but for me: No way! Auto gain, for me, only needs to come together with a very good multi-band processing. Not inside the SC or X with some simple limiter implementation. It would sound BAD.
The mentioned implementations in Traktor and Serato are also sub-par. I used it only for emergencies when someone handed me a track to play.
Now, I will not make this a loudness war, because that’s where we all were trained to listen to for “since way back when”. But if you prep your music reasonably well and keep all levels around the 0dB on the mixer, then the front of house engineer certainly will smile back at you!!
Back on topic: Yes good feature request, but not right now. Media management first and after that anything else.
My 2cents, obviously. 
Try using MP3gain - a FREE program that does this in batches: http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/download.php
I run all my music through it, but I still notice a few tracks have to be turned up on the X1800, like these other guys are saying, use your ears - OR your eyes (watch the voltage on the meters!).
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should have read: consistently “loud” from song to song
Autogain feature requested here.
I gave a shout out to the OGs in the request as well.
Feel free to like 
or ignore (thank goodness, there is no dislike button)
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Auto gain and normalize features on Engine Prime would transform the software from a database management software into an audio editing software. Implementing those kind of features would take time and would mean a whole rethinking the software from the ground up. Peak and RMS normalisation can be done in dedicated audio editing software to ensure that true peaks don’t go over 0 dB full-scale. RMS normalisation in order to have the same apparent average loudness between songs is not a good ideea, because a song with highly compressed loudness and low dynamic range would sound dull and lifeless when compared to a song with high dynamic range and less loudness compression. Loudness compression took the life out of the music in recent years and that’s why today we have people who end up asking for “autogain” features. When listening to music you want to feel like you want to turn the volume up and not down. Lastly, ask yourself this question: why do you think mixers have peak vu-meters and not loudness meters?
Any sufficiently-responsive but not too responsive peak meter, though, can give a rough sense of loudness from the way it bounces over time if you watch it carefully as the troughs drop below the approximate average loudness middle and the peaks bounce above it, but on a loudness meter you could take a snapshot to give an instantaneous indication of something like RMS. You can’t use a meter that’s exclusively for average loudness also for peaks, though.
Mixers usually have peak meters because you’re trying to prevent clipping first and foremost… and because loudness meters are laggy and slow as it’s a measure across time. You can do either or both if you really want, though, as Rane does in their combined quasi-meters or whatever they call it, where the lower portion of the meter is the slow-acting loudness portion and the top is the fast-acting peak component.
While I don’t think we need autogain, you would almost certainly do it based on RMS and maybe some equal loudness curve tonal analysis to then change the level. You’d change the level uniformly throughout the whole track and not automatically apply any compression or gating, but the level change would be based on the loudness analysis from the FFT stuff. So the RMS and tonal analysis is the tool you use to calculate the autogain, but you don’t try to automatically change RMS or tone.
I can also see how one could hypothetically implement such a system using only Engine Prime pre-analysis and it meta-tagging the songs with an autogain rational number. You’d have to make it some Utility/Preferences setting on the players and have the autogain number show up somewhere on screen. However, between the additional analysis necessary to do it right with automation and the delay in it occurring, I think it’s probably not something that should be added for player analysis. I suppose if it’s an option, people could always turn it off even if it was possible without EP pre-analysis.
While I’m not a fan of the autogain idea, if it does get momentum for implementation, it sure as heck better be way lower priority than the needed drastic overall sound quality improvements. Autogain as a higher priority would probably compel me to jump the Prime ship for good, as that’d basically be a slap in the face of the claims there’s a problem with the Prime sound and be an indication there’s no plan or intention to fix it.
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If auto gain option would be useful to someone it can be implemented using file metadata value of “replay gain”.
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Is that an existing one?
Yes, it is and it is used for quite some time both by software media players and hardware media players.
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I think that’s how its implemented in Serato as well. It doesn’t remaster the track. It just increases the software gain.
Almost similar to you increasing a trim and storing it to memory.
So next time you play the track, if you look at the software gain knob you will see the change.
Some folks do it manually in Serato, I dont do it manually, I find autogain works for most of the stuff I play. But as folks mentioned in the feature request thread…EP doesn’t have software trim/gain knob yet.
The only “problem” with replay gain metadata is that you may have to use multiple copies of the same file (assigning different file names for the same track) in your collection in order to write the desired replay gain value in each copy taking into account the loudness of the previous and of the following file you want to mix with. So, basically, it will require to plan and prepare a set before you play it at the desired loudness. In my opinion, using replay gain is not really necessary for DJs on live events. We are not mixing on radio shows, where the listeners don’t like to fiddle the volume button on their radios. Music is dynamic and it should be like this in order to not be boring and induce fatigue for the audience. Where need be the master fader is always available to adjust the levels as desired.
I don’t think so. You utilize a target RMS (possibly with tonal emphasis) so all your tracks would use the same basis for the written meta data values. In Mixxx the target is adjustable and you can even choose the techniques used (there’s no perfect method), but in most other DJ softwares it is not adjustable. Old DJ softwares wrongly just normalized to 0dBFS, and then they’d give you a headroom setting that bumped either that track gain (if fixed point processing) or the master out gain (especially if it was mixing in float) down. Almost all now use some type of average loudness measurement for their autogains, with or without emphasis, and occasionally they let you choose the target.
Please don’t take this as me advocating for it, though. In software, autogain occurs in the mixer section, not the player sections, among other things. I’m shocked at the interest in autogain on standalone players and the lack of interest in better sound quality considering the state of Prime in that regard compared to the industry standard.
If replay gain would present itself like a viable option for Denon DJ to implement, we will see. For those who would like to use this kind of feature, it won’t hurt having it. But, imagine you would have to mix a song with about 9 dB of dynamic range with another song of about 18 dB of dynamic range. Which one you would choose to modify its loudness in order to mix with the other? How the other one would sound then? As for sound quality, I agree with you and can not stress enough that sound quality should be paramount for a professional audio equipment and should take precedence in front of all other features.
You’re confusing loudness with volume. Autogain does not modify loudness, it changes sample levels and thus just volume uniformally of the entire track. If the 18dB of RMS track is already at the loudness target and the 9dB RMS track has the same peak levels as the former, the 9dB RMS track is adjusted in gain by some negative rational number stored in that meta data tag. That tag for the 18dB RMS track would be 0.
It is exactly what I asked before, when I mentioned the difference between the two tracks. Altering the gain of the louder track in order to reach the target loudness of the quieter track would make the altered track to sound weak by attenuation of its peaks.
The whole point of autogain by analysis of RMS (with or without tonal emphasis analysis) is so that tracks of differing dynamics sound equivalently loud as each other based on some target. You’re still just changing uniform level, though. They could all start out mastered at -3dBFS, but if you play them all at the same volume, their varying dynamics causes them to have differing loudness. Autogain this way potentially changes their peak levels. Now instead trying to match them all based on peaks while also just changing uniform level is where you end up with the dynamically-compressed tracks sounding louder than the wider-dynamics tracks. The problem with even advanced loudness-based autogain is that it’s an imperfect science and it’s still better to do it by ear, not to mention both processing intensive in the analysis portion as well as in implementation, since the volume (uniform level changes of all samples in the track digital data) is also mathematically intensive and imperfect when it’s not just dividing or multiplying evenly (-6dB, etc).
So, my friend, if we will also have replay gain feature, where the pleasure and joy of working hands on with the faders and EQs will reside? You can call me old fashioned, but I enjoy the goodies of digital audio domain up to a point. I don’t particularly like to chop or alter the sound of a good piece of music out of respect for the author and for the message he intends to transmit with his song. No matter what I do during the mix, I do not want to detract from the song message. My job is to work discreetly behind the board and shine through the music I choose to play.
Agreed, not to mention that this function on DJ software is done on the mixer section, not the player sections. Even the Prime 4’s central big display is entirely dedicated to the player sections.