[microcolonel]

We could have by having EBU R128/ITU-R BS.1770 published before CD, and having those metadata built in to the CD standard, and perhaps requiring it.

The loudness war started before CD, but if we had this stuff back then it might have been possible to avoid these problems. As a consumer, I add BS.1770-based replaygain tags to all of my music, and set a constant gain offset for all applications which don't have loudness normalization.

I'm most annoyed by albums which have huge loudness gradients for completely different movements or independent tracks, it forces me to manually remove album replaygain tags in favour of the track values.

Notable also, this page makes no mention of loudness monitoring, which I think is outrageous. To complain about this problem without mentioning the existing solution is pretty bogus.