The popular and over produced trend is to compress and limit the final track so that all the headroom and dynamic life are sucked out of the performance in order to make it loud. Hope you don't choose to follow that trend...

Nothing wrong with someone having to turn up the volume knob when a song is not loud enough. That is what it is for.

Audiogaff is right... Your first choice would be hotter signals to start with without clipping...

I had that situation happen to me... This isnt the best method, but try and get ahold of someone who owns Soundforge and have them try a "Normalize" on the Audio track. It should boost the volume of the track without all the peaks...

Louder

You should be able to normalize it in Sonar - just import the track back in to a session - I'm not sure where the normalize function is, but it was in older versions of Cakewalk so it should be there.

Also - most CD burners and their software will reduce the volume somewhat, up to a couple dB - Sound Forge CD architect and Toast on the Mac side will both allow you to make up the lost volume when you burn the CD.

But if you want your stuff to sound like a mastered CD, then master it. Compared to tracking and mixing, mastering is dirt cheap - most will charge you a hundred dollars or less for one song.

Or send it to me - I'll do it.

Cheers fo the advice guys.
I have settled for a slightly quieter final result. It's only minimally quiter now, so I can handle that!!