Urgent advice needed for Normalize & output levels please!

Hi

Posted a while back re. a simple loop system i've created which loops and passes 8secons of audio using record~, buffer~ and index~. The loop can be layered, ie. destructive mixing with index~ feeds back into record~.

I'm using Normalize to stop clipping, and it seems to work, but here are the problems:

1. SOMETIMES, the loop begins to slowly fade out... and sometimes it doesn't... can someone explain this and advise a fix?

2. The master output is sometimes much softer, and I'll need to crank an amp to get a level out equal to other software, even thought I've used normalize...

I think both these problems are related to how normalize~ works, and that the first audio that it receives sets a dB benchmark or something...

as you can probably tell, i'm a beginner here, so any advice is welcome even if it's basics

many thanks
anthony

(I am going to build a multi-buffer loop soon... but I actually want the simplest thing at the moment... i'm sure someone's already built these; if there's one for download that i can look at, please point the way)