Dealing With Track Volumes

For me, it depends upon the primary listening environment and device. I normalize all needledrops to around 97-98% on the maximum peak, although if there are a couple of peaks that spike well above the rest, I'll manually reduce those in order to bring the overall level up. But for the most part, I don't obsess over such "rogue peaks" unless I'm making a compilation CD.

But even with maximum peaks at or near 100%, the perceived levels will still vary widely from song to song, so I let the device do the work, be it switching on the compressor setting on the car CD player, or running wav and FLAC files on shuffle play through a multiband compressor/limiter, such as the free version of Stereo Tool. There are a dizzying array of options for Stereo Tool; I use the generic setting and tailor the multiband compressor settings to taste, then typically feed the output into a part 15 AM transmitter (with its built-in compressor set *very* conservatively) and listen anywhere in the house, yard or garage. Stereo Tool also helps to homogenize the disparate levels when listening to its output straight off of the computer's speaker system.

In some cases, if the beginning of a song's intro is really low, and tends to get lost when using a player's cross-fader setting, I'll raise the intro's level to match the rest, and save that file separately, to use specifically for that player. I wouldn't hesitate to normalize maximum peaks to 100% for each track on a low-level '80s-vintage CD for player purposes. They'll still have all their dynamic range intact.

Modern remastering with DR figures under 6 or 7 is usually a deal-breaker for me. I've found restoring peak clipping can sometimes work to reduce loudness war casualties, but only on a case-by-case basis. In revisiting some 1990s CDs recently, I found that I could reduce the brickwalling on Teenage Fanclub's "Ain't That Enough" to an extent that lets it breathe a bit, but no matter how much I tinkered with Pet Shop Boys' "Go West," it didn't help. Even that track sounds decent enough running through Stereo Tool, but it would stick out like a sore thumb on a compilation CD, even with the level reduced. The last thing I want is for the experience of listening to music to be fatiguing, and brickwalled audio accomplishes that in seconds flat.     

I'm pretty much on the same page as YahShure. I use a
freeware automation program called Zararadio as a jukebox
in my workshop. Anything I dub into that I'll normalize to
-6dB in Adobe Audition. If something has a low-level
intro, I'll tweak that as well, but generally leave the
rest of the song alone. I run it thru a compressor on
playback anyway.
I'll use the same dubs to create mix mp3's for the car,
also compressed.

The original files get left unaltered. Most of the
downloads of recent songs are 320k mp3's, and I don't
really want to create additional artifacts by re-saving.

I don't fret about brickwalled contemporary songs...not
much you can do about it anyway...that's the only way these
songs are available, but I do get annoyed with older stuff
that's been remastered and brickwalled...changes the whole
feel of the song. For those I'll resort to needledrops.

If I'm ripping from a CD, I leave the levels as-is. So, the tracks in my collection can be all over the place.

On air, I use Virtual DJ, which automatically adjusts the volume level, similar to using ReplayGain. The software uses RMS volume level, rather than peak level, so it mimics human hearing a little better than a straight-up normalization to a fixed level.

My radio station uses Rivendell, which (I believe) has a default setting that normalizes everything to -13 dB (RMS, not peak.)