Thats the best way to describe it.  If you use Itunes, which I do only for my 80gb Classic it automatically no matter what you do adds Itunnorm tag to your music files.  Squeezebox,if you also have replay gain tags, will add the track gain and the itunnorm together so that you have huge volume reductions (or increases but rare in newer music) if you happen to use smartgain in the playback.  This is huge for a lot of people because if they have both, their playback is going to be knocked down 15 to 20 db on a lot of music and they will believe it's the Squeezebox.  I work around it by using just album gain in the Squeezebox as it's not affected, just the track gain.  Anyone that is using playlists or random play is going to be affected if they use the smart gain setting in the Squeezebox. Plus I would like to use it but can't now.  Many thanks, it's a great problem and I've seen in bug reports that a switch to choose itunes replay gain or standard replay gain is being looked at and that would work as long as you could then use smart gain for albums vs tracks.  It's seemed though to be set for the future and not important.  I think it's very important as you are going to have people thinking that the Squeezebox is not a good player because of the the volume decrease and won't figure out the problem. You may get some bad reviews or returns. Anyway again thank you.