MP3Gain vs Lacquer

Make all your audio the same volume — without touching the volume dial. Ever jump from one song to the next and grab for the volume button? Or finish a podcast that's twice as loud as the one before? MP3Gain fixes that. It measures the true loudness of your audio and applies exactly the right amount of gain, so everything you listen to, share, or upload sounds even and professional. Quick for everyday fixes. Precise for creators. Three measurement modes cover every job: • Peak — match tracks to a target peak level (in dB). • RMS — match the average energy of your tracks for consistent perceived volume. • EBU R128 (LUFS) — the international loudness standard used by streaming and broadcast platforms, with true-peak limiting. Built-in presets Start in one tap with presets tuned to real-world targets, and save your own for repeat jobs. • Music — RMS -20 dB • Podcast — EBU R128 -16 LUFS • Voice — EBU R128 -18 LUFS • Streaming Video — EBU R128 -14 LUFS • Default — EBU R128 -23 LUFS Batch processing Import a whole album, playlist, or batch of files and normalize them all at once. Adjust one file and apply the same settings to every file in your list. Progress is shown per file, and you can cancel anytime. Hear it before you export Play the original and the processed version side by side in the app, so you know it sounds right before you save or share it. Keep your music intact MP3Gain preserves embedded album art and metadata. Lossy formats keep their original bitrate; lossless files are processed without additional lossy compression. Import from anywhere • Select files from the Files app • Pull tracks straight from your Music Library • Open an audio file in MP3Gain from any app Note: DRM-protected tracks — for example, Apple Music subscription titles — can't be imported or processed. Supported formats MP3, FLAC, M4A, WAV, AIFF, and OGG. MP3Gain Pro The free plan processes up to 3 files per day — perfect for quick fixes. Upgrade to MP3Gain Pro for unlimited processing: • Yearly — $9.99/year • Lifetime — pay once at $19.99 and unlock forever Subscriptions renew automatically and can be managed or cancelled anytime in your Apple ID settings. Payment is charged to your Apple ID account at confirmation of purchase. The subscription automatically renews unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Your account is charged for renewal within 24 hours prior to the end of the current period. You can manage or turn off auto-renewal at any time in your Apple ID account settings. Privacy Policy: https://getseasoft.com/legal/privacy-policy Terms of Use: https://getseasoft.com/legal/terms-of-service

A lot of the "hi-res" music out there isn't. A file can say 24-bit/96kHz on the label and still be an MP3 that somebody re-encoded into a FLAC container and sold on. Your player shows the badge and has no idea. Lacquer does. It reads the audio itself — not the file name, not the metadata tags — and tells you what is actually inside. QUALITY CHECK Every lossless file you import is decoded and analysed on your phone, with an FFT running on Apple's Accelerate framework. Nothing is uploaded. There is no account. The verdict does not come from a single cut-off number. Three things are weighed: how steeply the top end falls away, whether that fall makes sense for the sample rate the file claims, and whether the same edge sits in the same place across different parts of the track. Real recordings fade out, and they wander. An encoder's cut does not. It is also careful about what it says. A flagged file reads "may be upscaled", never "fake" — an old master or a quiet orchestral recording can look suspicious for perfectly honest reasons. When a file's top end simply ends too low for the evidence to point either way, Lacquer says it cannot tell, rather than guessing. Every verdict shows the number it was based on and the line that number was measured against, so you can look at the evidence and disagree. SEE THE EVIDENCE Tap the artwork while a track is playing and it turns over. On the back is the file — format, bit depth, sample rate, size — and under it the device you are actually listening on and the rate coming out of it. Below that is everything between the file and your ears: EQ, speed, sample-rate conversion and Bluetooth re-encoding. A file that failed the check does not get to show off the specs it claims. The label switches to the evidence instead: the claim struck through, where the sound really stops, how wide the roll-off is, and the threshold that decided it. WHAT REACHES YOUR DAC A signal path sheet shows file, engine and output side by side and says plainly whether anything is being resampled on the way through. Switch on "match the file's rate" and Lacquer asks the output to run at the file's own sample rate, and takes the equalizer and speed controls out of the path entirely. iOS will not tell an app which rates a connected DAC accepts, so Lacquer finds out the only way there is: it asks for each rate in turn and reads back what the hardware actually did. The answer is remembered for that device. TUNED TO YOUR HEADPHONES Import the ParametricEQ.txt measured for your headphone model and Lacquer plays everything through that correction. Pair it with a device and it turns on by itself when you connect. Add up to 10 bands of your own on top, dragged right on the graph, or pick a sound style in one tap. The preamp drops automatically so boosts never clip. THE REST OF THE PLAYER Lacquer plays FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC and m4a from your own library, gapless, with crossfade, and shows the lyrics embedded in your files. Bring music in from the Files app, from your DRM-free iTunes tracks, or straight off your own server — Lacquer has native SMB and WebDAV clients for the NAS boxes that never appear properly in Files. There is an Apple Watch companion for playback control. Everything stays on the device. It works on a plane. LACQUER PRO Unlocks Quality Check results for every file, headphone correction, the parametric equalizer, unlimited imports, cloud import and an ad-free app. Weekly, yearly, or a one-time lifetime purchase. The free version shows ads. Lacquer never plays DRM-protected tracks and never bypasses any protection. It is a player for music you already own. Privacy Policy: https://lacquer.siamclaw.com/privacy-policy.html Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/