Not being the most active listener of music I haven’t had much experienced with ripping CD’s but I recently bought some audio books and decided that it would be a lot easier to listen to them by simply opening the files on the hard disc instead of changing CD’s all the time.

But I ran across a problem/question I couldn’t really find an answer for and therefore I registered here, to see if anybody would be able to help me.

Okay here the problem is:
There are about 20-30 tracks per chapter and I would like to merge these tracks into one file per chapter, I intend to use foobar to do this and probably compresses the files to flac to keep them lossless. But these tracks do not have the same peak.
For example:
While the first track in the chapter might have a peak of 99% the next might have one of 77%.
I’m at a bit of a loss as how to continue

Should I normalize these 30 or so tracks to the same peak % (probably 98%)?

Or Should I extract these 30 tracks to PCM files and then run a RG (AG) on them?

Or should I leave the peak level alone till I merge them into one file?

I’m mostly afraid that modifying the peak level of one track will make louder throughout the track and will then be too loud compared to how loud some of the other tracks might be.

Thanks in advance for any advice or information.

Unless the producers screwed up greatly, the variation is peaks is intended. Some people speak in a monotone with hardly varying sound level, no matter what they say, but most people's speech will have differences from sentence to sentence. If the book is "dramatized,' as many are, these differences will tend to be still greater. Changing the relative levels will destroy the performance.

You can albumgain them, or merge and replaygain or merge and normalize. Whatever.

Thanks for the answers, I guess this was the answer I was expecting, but it’s always nice to be sure.
My main confusion was caused by another audio book I had which seemed to be normalized since all the track peaks were the exact same. It doesn’t sound bad, it’s actually quite good.
Well thanks again now I can get on with ripping and merging without hesitation.