| Good idea, but I see three problems: 1. Chicken and egg: Until such a feature is ubiquitous, labels can't rely on its presence, and won't release in a suitable format. Until there is demand, player manufacturers won't include it. And I don't see much independent consumer demand. 2. There is no one algorithm or processing technique which will give optimal results for all inputs. The process is still an art requiring a lot of skill and, well, taste. Mastering is still a real necessity. There's crude automated compression, sure, but for the real end product I don't think anyone wants that. 3. The sound is already mixed at the consumer end. For successful remastering (which is basically what you're doing on the fly) the separate tracks would be needed. For example, in an otherwise uncompressed track, a distorted electric guitar is pretty much naturally compressed. Drums are the opposite. Naively just compressing the whole thing will keep the guitar and lose the drums. I'm really oversimplifying here but hopefully you get the picture. I do think such an approach could work, but you'd need to supply the mixable tracks, or relevant groups of them at least, and then supply mixing/compression instructions to the player. If the instructions were standardised with fairly predictable and consistent results, that could be a way to implement such a scheme. |