I find that the bitrate doesn't seem to matter all that much. What I do to bring up the volume level is bring it into Roxio's sound editor; select all; normalize; and save. This is also a good tool to repair a good song that has been chopped off abruptly at the end with a fade out. Another great tool with the creator 9 is it's big help in straightening out your files by trying to corrrectly rename them and at the same time find the audio tags(genre;artist; album...). That's a biggie in my book.