ReplayGain Gained
The last iteration of Winamp added ReplayGain support. This little feature comes in handy. Ever listen to a few albums in a row (or have your songs on shuffle) and you have to keep changing the volume manually because sometimes the songs are too loud or too soft? Well, ReplayGain fixes that. It adds metadata to your audio files (the audio part remains untouched) which tells a ReplayGain compatible player (Winamp, Foobar2000, and others) what decibel level to play that track/album at, thus keeping the whole album at a constant decibel volume (or a track, depending on your settings) when compared to another album.
So I added all this metadata to my files last night, but there seems to be a bug with Foobar2000 where my M4A/AAC audio file tags aren’t being read. What a pain, will bug the developers about this, either Foobar2000 (most likely) or Tag&Rename.
So now when listening to music, I don’t have to keep messing with my volume controls. You don’t realize how awesome this feature is until you actually start using it. I think iTunes has a similar feature called Soundcheck that does the same thing, the metadata may even be compatible. I don’t use iTunes except to copy over my songs to my iPod, so doesn’t really affect me.