questions were asked in the forums about how mp3 gain works... id like to clear that all up before going anyfurther

it can do both gain maximizing and percieved loudness mode - you can get clipping but your tracks sound the same volume..

most of us use the percieved loudness mode
direct quote from help file of mp3gain below
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MP3Gain can also make changes based on the peak amplitude of the mp3, ignoring how loud the mp3 actually sounds to the human ear.
This peak adjustment is what most audio programs mean by "normalizing". To differentiate between "peak" normalizing and "loudness" normalizing, I use the term "maximizing" when talking about peak normalizing.
Maximizing can be used to make an mp3 as loud as possible without clipping. This can be useful, but keep in mind that this will not make your mp3s the same volume. In fact, if you maximize every track on a CD, some of the original quiet tracks can become louder than the original loud tracks.

Peak Normalization
Most programs that "normalize" sound files do so by adjusting all the samples so that the loudest single sample is at some specified value. This is not a good way to make all the files actually have the same loudness. First of all, the human ear does not hear the loudness of single samples. It averages out sounds over time. Secondly, today's popular music CDs are heavily compressed. The sound engineers making the CD raise the average level so that it sounds much louder, while compressing the loudest parts so that they don't distort.

MP3Gain uses the Replay Gain algorithm to calculate this loudness.

Lossless Gain Adjustment

The bad news: MP3Gain can only adjust the volume of your mp3 files in steps of 1.5 dB.

The good news: 1.5 dB is a small enough step for most practical purposes. Most humans can just barely hear a volume change of 1 dB.

The other good news is that this volume adjustment is completely lossless. In other words, if you adjust an mp3 by -6 dB and then change your mind, you can adjust it again by +6 dB and it will be exactly the same as it was before you made the first adjustment.

Here's the technical reason why it's lossless, and also why the smallest change possible is 1.5 dB:

The mp3 format stores the sound information in small chunks called "frames". Each frame represents a fraction of a second of sound. In each frame there is a "global gain" field. This field is an 8-bit integer (so its value can be a whole number from 0 to 255).

When an mp3 player decodes the sound in the frame, it uses the global gain field to multiply the decoded sound samples by 2(gain / 4).

So if you add 1 to this gain field in all the frames in the mp3, you effectively multiply the amplitude of the whole file by 2(1/4) = 119% = +1.5 dB.

Likewise, if you subtract 1 from the global gain, you multiply the amplitude by 2(-1/4) = 84% = -1.5 dB.
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i know right now your thinking, i dont want to make serato ever make a mp3 clip, and then get the program blamed for it by idiots (or the undereducated) who dont understand the audio gain chain... it is a sticky situation, more exuctive desicions to be made than auto bpm for sure...

id like to suggest that early on in the development of the auto gain you seperate the horziontal and vertical waveform zoom for the master track view the one thats always zommed out vertically

right now i have a lot of my waveforms pretty small in the "master track view" id like to be able to simulate them being "louder" even if it didnt remember it as not to "distort the image" as had been mentioned if the gain was set back to zero...

the reason they are "smaller than ""normal"" is because i only want a little clipping on very few tracks, the ones that are very dynamic "read not mastered well by todays pop standards?"
these are also more likley in vinyal rips than cd rips...