I use Album Gain Mode for all my CD rips and am very happy with the results when playing random songs from a variety of albums. mp3gain's algorithm will either "fill" or "subtract" from the gain values in each album to bring them to an optimum level (not necessarily to the maximum). You need to read the explanation of the algorithm that mp3gain uses to better understand this...see these two sites: http://www.geocities.com/mp3gain/ http://replaygain.hydrogenaudio.org/