Audio Leveling Software Recommendation?

I do audio editing with a Windows-based professionally oriented program called Sony Sound Forge Pro, which is very powerful, very stable, and very easy to use (and also expensive). I suspect that its consumer oriented counterpart, Sound Forge Audio Studio ($55) would do fine for your purposes:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/soundforgesoftware

These programs were originally developed by a USA company called Sonic Foundry, which was bought by Sony several years ago.

Good luck!
-- Al

foobar 2k had replay gain which solves the dilemma. It's free to boot

It may not be a soluable problem. Many recordings (e.g., all pop) use so much compression that they will sound "louder" than others, if both are correctly recorded at maximum levels. You don't want to rip them at lower levels, as that increases noise and distortion, and you don't want to compress the well recorded records and take the life out of them. I use Wavelab pro mastering software, which can be used to adjust any parameter, but can not recommend that route; it is not only expensive, but very hard to learn. I agree with Al that a consumer level solution would be preferable, and it should still have the functionality you need.

Thanks all. Lloydc I can appreciate your perspective and wondered if this could be solved to my satisfaction. I like the idea the idea of replay gain because it employs tags on playback and doesn't alter the original file. My ideal is replay gain applied only to playlists I create with the Squeezebox server. So far that doesn't seem doable. Sound Forge Audio Studio allows a downloadable trial so i am going to pursue that. I've got LPs that date to the early 60s (pop and classical) up through recently mastered CDs the dynamic range and use of compression is all over the map. And as I said, I'm not averse to spending a few dollars (or more) since the titles in my collection number well into the thousands. Maybe I should have collected stamps!

Thanks again to all of you for your advice.