Increase volume of Classic Rock CD's

[Trebor]

I have a collection of old and new music on my phone. I usually just put it on shuffle when I’m listening in the car. Some of the older songs that were originally mastered for vinyl have a much lower volume and require me to turn the volume up and down, depending on the song. When I open one of these in Audacity, the overall volume is lower but there are scattered peaks close to 0db. All I want to do is raise the level by a few dB. I think the limiter function can do this but is there a wrong or right way to use it. I’ve tried Hard and Soft limiting, combinations of both and even Soft Limit twice. The “Boston” CD is a good example.

Audacity’s compression/limiting are one-band operating over the entire audio spectrum.
Multi-band compressors produce a better result with mixed music, (e.g. no pumping).
There are free Multi-band compressor plugins which work in Audacity on Windows, e.g.
[ You may still have to use a limiter after compression to maximize the volume ]