• Extract the raw audio data from the CDs
• Encode the raw audio data to MP3
• Set-up the MusicBrainz tagger
• Tag and organize your files with MusicBrainz
• Troubleshooting MusicBrainz problems
• Normalize the MP3 files as albums

• Tag and organize downloaded MP3 files
• Normalize downloaded MP3 files

Extract the raw audio data from the CDs

Encode the raw audio data to MP3

Tag and organize album-originated MP3 files

We'll use MusicBrainz to tag the files with highly-reliable and highly-consistent data. MusicBrainz will also put each album's files into a separate directory, which we need to do for the next step.

Normalize the MP3 files as albums

In this step, we'll use MP3Gain to normalize each albums files as an album, so that we preserve the intra-album (ie, from song to song) volume changes.

Tag and organize downloaded MP3 files

In the case of downloaded MP3's, we don't necessarily have complete albums... and we're not really sure what albums all of these MP3's came from. So, we configure MusicBrainz not to put the files in album directories and to not put the album name in the filenames.

Normalize downloaded MP3 files

Again, since the album information with these files is dubious (and also since we don't have complete albums, usually), we will normalize these files individually instead of as an album.