The Sound Check feature of iTunes seems to be getting worse and worse. I ripped an album tonight and Sound Check assigned the first song a playback volume of -17.7!!! I have to wonder if iTunes is reporting an incorrect playback volume in the info summary, because there's no way a song ripped from a CD out to be lowered by almost 18 dB on playback.

I ran the latest iVolume on the whole album (manual album setting, 92 dB perceived loudness) and the volume was changed to -5.1 -- a much more reasonable level. However, iVolume reported a "previous volume" significantly different than the info in iTunes (-8.4 versus -17.7). This does not compute. Anyone have thoughts on this?

As to the problem of not setting the volume tags on AAC protected songs, I've been able to trick it by putting songs purchased from the iTunes store in a playlist, then doing a Manual Album Mode volume adjustment on all the songs in the playlist. For some reason, iVolume will proceed with the adjustment in album mode (but not in Single Song Mode). Weird, but it seems to work. The Get Info summary shows that the volume tags have been adjusted on the purchased songs. Go figure.