To try to prod this thread to life again...

What about ripping vinyl?  EZCD has a cool feature where it will sense
periods of silence (configurable sensitivity), and break a recording
into seperate files where the gaps are, so you can put an album on, let
it record, and you won't have to manually split a 20 minute recording.

Is there something in Linux that will do that?

Does anybody have any tips on normalizing with grip?