Don't worry about not having normalized in the past. I was worried about it for a while, and then I realized that it didn't make any difference: All my CD's were already normalized, even the ones that I thought sounded too quiet.

The thing that makes one song sound louder than another isn't normalization, it's dynamic range compression, something done at the mastering stage when an album is created. It's the same reason that TV commercials sound louder than the TV shows. The TV show and the commercial both have the same peak level, it's just that the commercial compresses the dynamic range so that it hits that peak more often. Same thing with albums: Some are dynamically compressed more than others, therefore they sound louder. Normalization won't help that at all.

There have been many discussions on this BBS about the topic, do some searches and see what you come up with.

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Tony Fabris