[Mike Rivers]

Federico wrote:
Don't normailze those tracks. Put a gain plug on each and tweak it until
you put each track into a nice range for mixing.
ha

Is there any difference?

Only in the amount of control you have. Some DAWs have no options for
normalization, they just do what we've all been assuming you did - jack
up the gain until the highest level sample is at full scale. Others let
you set the peak level so you can normalize to, say, -3 dBFS rather than
full scale. Still others compute the RMS level of the segment you're
normalizing and raise the overall level based on that. I'm not really
sure how that works though, since unless it also applies some gain
reduction on peaks (compression or limiting) this would suggest that
peaks could reach digital clipping level.

A "gain plug" (or the DAW's built-in gain control) lets you adjust the
level selectively.