I thought the upgrade price was steep, too, but then I used it. I used to use the old one and it was just okay--it did an important job, but not particularly elegantly. And eventually the issue with the iTunNORM tags made it virtually unusable.

The new one is ridiculously fast compared to the older versions if you have a CPU that can take advantage of it. I'm on a Mac Pro and it is on pace to power through a 21,000-song collection in about 8 hours, even while using the computer for other tasks. In the old version, you're looking at 3-4 days for the same size library. It also has not crashed once--the old one used to crash every few hours (semi-understandable considering the amount of data being processed for such a long period of time, but still annoying).

As for the iTunNORM tag errors, I finally broke down and tried the process outlined on their Web site, and while it does take time, I didn't find it particularly "painful"--you're just creating a temporary library, deleting it and going back to your old one like nothing happened. And after doing that, I haven't seen a single one of those errors, so it must have worked.

The one remaining caveat is that protected iTunes tracks can't be analyzed. But they can still use the default iTunes SoundCheck adjustments, which are imperfect but better than nothing.

I'm glad this has been upgraded. It's absolutely essential if you listen to your tracks at work or on an iPod and don't want to be changing the volume every time a new song comes on.