Digital music volume problem.

[Matt Morgan]

The main reason I don't absolutely love digital music is the volume 
problem. I ripped everything to ogg vorbis with grip, and the volume of 
each song varies so widely that every third song I have to fix the 
volume. This is OK on my desktop but it's hard to imagine doing that 
with the laptop attached to my home audio system.

How do people handle this? Is there ripping software that will look for 
the volume peaks and set the volume for each track so the highest peaks 
are the same? I realize that wouldn't be perfect--across different 
genres of music especially--but maybe there is some smarter way. I have 
also heard that doing this can damage the quality of the music, since it 
may tend to amplify ambient noise, but I sincerely doubt that would 
bother me as much as having to interrupt dinner to change the volume on 
the stereo. Apart from grip, I checked Rhythmbox (Sound Juicer?) briefly 
and it didn't seem to have any such setting either. But maybe I'm blind.

The other way to handle it is in the player, I guess. I have an external 
USB SoundBlaster sound card that comes with some software that manages 
the volume from track to track, or so it claims. I kind of doubt it does 
this dynamically, but rather reads through the tracks and saves metadata 
in them that it then reads when playing. The software is Windows-only, 
I'm pretty sure, and I haven't tried it yet. Is there some Linux 
counterpart?

Thanks a lot,
Matt