any wave editing program will normalise waves. Instead of recording into the Technics Audio recorder you just record direct into Goldwave and then increase the level to x % of peak. There are many other things you can do. Record 10 or 20 waves, make your cd, convert to mp3, then erase the waves to save space on the hard drive.

I see I forgot to answer the tags question. Artist, title, genre, album text can all be embedded in mp3s. There are 2 standards, if you buy a portable mp3 player they can display this text rather than the filenames. I have flash memory players that display ver1 ID3 and portable hard drive players that display ver 2 ID3. This information is what you see diplayed in winamp if written to mp3. Highlight a mp3 in winamp and do an Alt 3 to fill in the fields. There are many auto renaming programs that can rename lists of mp3s automatically.