AFAIK bitrate has nothing to do with perceived loudness, and reencoding degrades the quality too much IMHO.
MP3Gain operates in two modes, Radio and Album.
Radio mode allows a mix of unrelated songs to be volume-corrected to a selected level. MP3Gain calculates the volume level for each song individually. It then corrects each song to make its volume level match the Target Volume. For example, if you have 3 songs that have volume levels of 86, 91 and 89 dB and you use Radio Gain to convert them to the Target Volume of 98 dB, they will all be at approximately 98 dB.
Album mode allows a selection of related songs (as they would appear on an album) to be volume-corrected relative to each other. MP3Gain first calculates the album volume level by finding the volume level of each song and then calculating a volume level for the entire album. It then finds the ratio between the album volume level and the Target Volume. It then corrects the volume for each song based on the ratio. For example, if you have 3 songs that have volume levels of 86, 91 and 89 dB and an album volume level of 90 and you use Album Gain to convert them to the Target Volume of 98 dB, then the 3 songs will be corrected to 93.6, 99 and 96.9 dB respectively:
Album volume level 90 / Target Volume 98 = 1.088888
Song #1 volume level 86 dB * 1.088888 = 93.6 dB
Song #2 volume level 91 dB * 1.088888 = 99.0 dB
Song #3 volume level 89 dB * 1.088888 = 96.9 dB
With Album mode, you want some songs to be noticeably quieter than other songs, just like they are on an album. If you're playing a classical CD, you expect the track with the flute solo to be quieter than the track with the big full-orchestra finale. Album mode allows you to correct an entire album while keeping each song's volume level relative to the other songs.
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.Both of these files have a peak sample at about 100%, but the compressed file has a much louder average level. It sounds much louder when played back. So to do actual loudness normalization instead of peak normalization, we need to calculate how loud the file actually sounds. 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.
http://www.geocities.com/mp3gain/
http://www.replaygain.org/