Automated equalization? I never found one I liked.

Manual tweaking? Acoustica! You can drag and drop any number and combination of WAV, WMA and MP3 files (even overlap them!), then tweak volume, balance and other parameters to your heart's content, and then export the entire shebang into your choice of WAV, WMA or MP3, either as one big file or multiple files with endpoints you set yourself.

The best damn 30 bucks I ever spent on software.

Nero comes bundled with a lot of optical disc drives. You could easily buy a DVD burner, and get Nero with it, for less than $80. But, upon further reflection, I think you already have a DVD burner.

Nero is also readily available through the usual, uh, sketchy channels. In fact, it's probably the most widely-available-through-sketchy-channels software that isn't produced by Microsoft or Adobe.

Probably not the answer you're looking for but I'd just torrent Nero. Other than that, I got nothin.

Oh, you can also record directly into Acoustica, edit files for sampling and then create loops, overdub and time-shift individual tracks.

For microscopic sound mixing and edits, Audacity, and it's open source freeware!

I suppose mentioning that Windows Media Player (10) has a "apply volume leveling" on the quality tab of the burn menu would get me tarred and feathered.

MP3 CDa Converter.
Acoustica MP3 CD Burner.

The handiest application I have had for Acoustica are the curves, the easiest being a straight increase in volume as the song progresses, say from 85% at the beginning to 110% at the end.

The problem I had with automated volume equalizing is just because two songs peaks are the same afterwards, that doesn't mean they flow into each other well.

dano: Actually, WiMP is about as good as they come for automated processing.

Cool, thanks for the tips, y'all.