Sample levels during preview and normalising

[Xenon20]

Hi All,

I'm currently getting my sample collection in shape, and I'm trialling Sononym sample manager. One thing that becomes obvious when searching through sounds is that it's quite hard to objectively compare samples (in terms of quality, timbre etc) with each other due to the differences in the RMS/peak levels of each sound. For example, I plan to go through all my kicks and favourite the ones I like most but the ear naturally thinks the louder samples are better.

This lead me to wonder if it would be a good idea to normalise everything so that everything was at similar level, but I'm not sure if this is a good idea because of noise and also intentional velocity layers of some sample sets etc.

So my question is, is it a good idea to normalise all of my samples, and if not, is there an easy way to be able to preview them (in Sononym or within the DAW) at the same level to be able to make better comparisons between sounds ?

Thanks
X20