Music Minder is a free desktop tool that makes every album in your music library play at the same volume, without touching the music itself—and, if you ask it to, trims the dead air off the ends of tracks and even folds 'electronic' (fake) stereo back to mono.

What It Does

Every album was mastered at its own volume. A record from 1975 is quiet; one from 2005 is loud; a compilation is all over the place. So you reach for the volume knob every time the album changes. Music Minder measures each album once, writes a small note into every track saying how much to turn it up or down, and from then on your player does the adjusting for you. Nothing in the audio is changed; the note is just a tag, like the artist's name, and removing it puts everything back exactly as it was.

That note is called ReplayGain, and nearly every music player honors it—foobar2000, MusicBee, Plex, VLC, Winamp, MediaMonkey, most phone players, and so on.

Using It

Drop a folder on the window. It can be a single album, an artist's whole shelf, or the entire library. Whatever you drop, the window shows what's inside it and the first cover it finds, and waits. Nothing starts until you press Start, so there's time to read the options first.

Press Start. Music Minder walks the folders, decides what's an album, and works through them one at a time. While it does, you see the album's cover and its track list, with the track being measured picked out and finished ones greyed; a bar for the album and a bar for the whole job; and a list of everything done so far with each album's gain. It goes at a few hundred times real time, so a whole library is an afternoon rather than a week.

Come back to it whenever you like. Albums that already have their note are skipped, so if you stop half way—or add a hundred albums next month—you just drop the library on it again and it picks up where it left off. An album with even one untagged track is measured again in full, so the numbers are never half-and-half.

Album Gain, Track Gain, and Compilations

There are two ways to even out the volume, and Music Minder chooses between them for each album.

Album gain measures the whole album as one piece and writes the same adjustment into every track. The album as a whole lands at the standard volume, but the quiet song stays quieter than the loud one, exactly as the band and their producer meant. This is what a real album gets.

Track gain brings every song to the same volume on its own. On a real album that's wrong—it flattens the rise and fall that was sequenced into the record—but on a compilation it's exactly right, because there the differences between tracks aren't anyone's intention; they're just twelve masterings from twelve years. Music Minder spots compilations by where they're filed (a Various Artists folder), by their tags (an album artist of "Various Artists", or different artists across the tracks), and by their titles (Greatest Hits, Best Of, Anthology…), and gives those track gain only. You can override it either way.

Film scores and cast recordings are treated as albums, not compilations, because they are.

Tidying the Tracks

Two more things Music Minder can do, both off by default, because both change the audio itself:

Strip silence from the ends of tracks. Ripped CDs and old transfers often carry a second or three of nothing at the start and end of each track. Music Minder cuts the start clean and trims the end down to whatever you set on the slider—half a second, unless you say otherwise—so tracks follow each other the way they should without slamming into one another. It never adds silence: a track that was already cut tight, or that runs straight into the next one, is left exactly as it is. Classical albums are left alone altogether, since there the pause between movements is part of the music. Lossless files (FLAC, WAV, AIFF, Apple Lossless) are re-encoded exactly; MP3s and other lossy files are cut at frame boundaries with no re-encoding, so nothing is lost twice.

Fold stereo that is really mono to one channel. A great deal of old music was recorded in mono and then stored as stereo with the same sound in both channels, taking twice the space for nothing. Music Minder checks whether the two channels actually differ—it's careful about this; genuine stereo, however narrow, is never touched—and folds the ones that don't. Lossless formats only; folding an MP3 would mean encoding it a second time, so those are reported and left as they are.

Any track that's changed has its ReplayGain note removed, so the next measuring pass looks at the track as it now is. And every rewrite goes to a temporary file first and replaces the original only once it's been checked, so a crash or a bad encode can't cost you a song.

Grading

Grade quality and set folder icons does, in passing, what my Analyze Audio tool did on its own: every track is graded by its bitrate—gold for genuine hi-res, silver for CD-quality lossless, black for ordinary lossy, tan for the poor stuff—and each album folder gets a pie-chart icon showing the mix, with the album's own cover standing in at the largest size. Artist folders, and the library itself, get icons rolled up from everything beneath them, so you can see at a glance where the weak spots are without opening a single folder. Hover over any of them and the tooltip gives the percentages.

Artist Credits

Format artist credits as Artist; Guest; Guest tidies the one tag that every source gets wrong differently. A guest belongs in the artist field, not the song's name; so "Song (feat. Guest)" becomes "Song", and Guest joins the artist as "Artist; Guest". "Artist feat. Guest", "featuring", "ft." and a bracketed "(with Guest)" or "(duet with Guest)" in the artist field all become the same "Artist; Guest". And fields that some taggers store as several values—the ones that show up as "Artist // Guest" in other programs—come back as one field with your semicolons in it.

It is careful about what it doesn't know. Simon & Garfunkel stays Simon & Garfunkel, AC/DC stays AC/DC, Sleeping With Sirens stays a band and "Dancing With Myself" keeps its title. A bare "with" is never taken as a guest, only a bracketed one; and an ampersand or a comma only separates people inside a guest clause, where that's what it means. Anywhere else it's part of a name.

Other Options

• Remove all ReplayGain tags—undoes everything, album by album, if you decide you'd rather not.
• Treat Disc 1, Disc 2… folders as one album—so a box set gets one album gain, not one per disc.
• Keep each file's modification date—so your backup program doesn't see the whole library as new.
• Preview only—lists what it would do and changes nothing. A good first run on a big library.
• Target loudness, clipping protection and true-peak measurement, for those who know what they want.

Every option is remembered between runs, and a log of every run is kept and can be opened from the window when it's done.

What's Inside

The measuring is done by rsgain, an open-source scanner that carries the same loudness engine the broadcasters use. A copy comes with Music Minder, and when a newer release appears the program fetches it on its own. Trimming and folding are done by ffmpeg, which is on most machines already and is downloaded the first time it's needed if not. The How It Works page has the details, for the curious.

Download

If you'd like to try Music Minder, grab the installer below. It needs 64-bit Windows and nothing else—everything it depends on is inside the installer, so there is no runtime to chase down first, and it installs for you alone, so no administrator password is asked for.

• Download Music Minder

How Music Minder Works

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 9/6/2026		Page Views: 26
Hashtags: #Software #Music #ReplayGain #rsgain #ffmpeg #Loudness #EBUR128 #FLAC #MP3
What Music Minder actually does to your files, in what order, and what it leans on to do it.
Estimated reading time: 8 minute(s) (1719 words)

Music Minder is mostly a conductor. The measuring is done by a program called rsgain and the audio surgery by ffmpeg; Music Minder decides what an 'album' is, what to do to it, in what order, and shows you what's happening, while it's happening. This page is for anyone who wants to know exactly what that means for their files.