There's also 'gnusound' - pretty simple, but it should do what you need.
'kwave' can handle really massive files (I've edited 90+ minutes of CD quality audio with 256MB RAM on this) and from what I can remember it has a normalise plugin.
For mp3 conversion I'd use 'lame' at the command line (its command line options are very simple).
At the moment I use 'krecord' to record live (DJ) mixes, as it's got particularly good input input monitoring, and 'lame' for compression.
On the odd occasion I have to normalise tracks I use 'normalize':
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~cvaill/normalize/
you can do a whole folder in one go with
$ normalize -m *.wav
so it could save you some time by doing everything in one batch.
You could even go all-command-line and use 'streamer' to record the audio
e.g. $ streamer -t 1:00:00 -O soundtrack.wav -F stereo
would record an hour of stereo CD quality audio ( you can record at anything up to 48kHz I believe).
Which raises the interesting possibility of a script that does the whole process for you (I've used something similar to this to record a film soundtrack while I was out of the house before)
#!/bin/bash
streamer -t 2:00:00 -O withnail.wav -F stereo
normalize -m withnail.wav
lame -h -b 256 withnail.wav withnail.mp3
Just a thought.........
Dave
