I don't think I could be convinced to write a Windows interface, but if you wanted to do that I could supply the back-end. The only catch is all my code will be licensed under GPL.

The idea I have to come up with a normalization offset is to look at the requantized frequency values coming out of the Huffman decoder to determine the absolute peak -- and then compute the gain offset needed to normalize it, applying this gain to the entire bitstream. As it turns out, the way the requantization formula works makes this almost trivial to compute. Each global_gain offset multiple of 4 will affect the frequency value amplitudes by a factor of 2.

I think you already said this, but the only time I could see this not working well is when the bitstream is already "normalized" but the peaks do not correspond with maximum frequency amplitudes the way it is indended to be heard. For example, you may not want to peak-normalize something intended to be quiet with very low peaks throughout. In this case I think some user discretion is needed.

I'll try writing some code to do this anyhow and you can see how well it works.

-v