Due to the fact that there is no standard for volumes levels on audio CDs (and therefore mp3s that are derived from these) it is often necessary to normalize your mp3 tracks to avoid the problem of the played songs volume being inconsistant from track to track.

one of the best methoods to do this is with mp3gain.

a good guide for doing this in the windows version of mp3gain is posted at the lower half of this page mp3gain guide.

for linux users there is also javamp3gain This is a java application that provides a basic gui for the mp3gain commands.

Songs encoded at a higher level also may have “clipping” (where the level saturates the maximum level resulting in an annoying clicking sound). Normalizing the tracks with “mp3gain” and using the default 89 db setting will generally give a reasonable level with minimal clipping.

You can also normalize all files in a directory using mp3gain from good old command prompt using this command:

mp3gain -r -c -d .89 *.*