ve got about 1800 todo.....
1800 songs or albums? There's another consideration - On an album some songs are intentionally louder than others.
If listen to whole albums and
if you want to maintain the "original artistic integrity" you should make one file for the whole album and normalize the album as a whole before splitting the songs.
And if you're listening to individual songs you should know that the peaks don't correlate well with loudness so if you normalize all of your music some songs (and some albums) will still be louder than others.
...Audacity does have a Loudness Normalization effect which targets an LUFS loudness level instead of targeting the peaks like regular normalization. Loudness Normalization doesn't automatically check for clipping so you probably don't want to use it in a macro. There are 3rd-party volume-matching tools such as ReplayGain, WaveGain, and MP3Gain and they can be configured to avoid clipping. These also allow you to choose between album & track mode and they can batch-process, but I think you have to process on album at a time if you want the album mode.
When I digitize vinyl I normalize the album as a whole, but then I use ReplayGain (usually in track mode) on Winamp or Sound Check on my iPod at playback-time.
This forum is for Audacity on Windows.