The subject line pretty much describes the frustrating RB behaviour I came across last night, and I guess what I'm after is an explanation and/or a coping strategy:
I started off with audio extracts of between 30 and 90 seconds of 5 tunes (demos), ripped off a CD as separate files. The intention was to assemble them into a single track (to then convert it to mp3 and put up on a website as band samples). So I went to File/Import and got them, one at a time, onto the first 5 tracks in a new track window - so far so good.
My next move was to select track 2 and drag n' drop it onto the end of track 1; well it dropped OK, just where I wanted it but instead of it being as it previously was,the whole section dropped from track 2 was uniformly increased in volume: the loud bits looked and sounded clipped and ugly - no good at all. Very disconcerting, but OK, if that's gonna happen, try copy/paste instead...
same result except I'm gettin' madder.
At this point I start dragging things around (different extracts, that is), and as far as my experiment went it seems that I can drag within a track OK, or I can drag to the same location from track to track and even sometimes across tracks to different locations just as you would expect, but other times not and the same symptom would occur: amplitude "expanding" to beyond clipping point. (Not that a lesser increase would be acceptable: I want my stuff the same on arrival as on departure.)
I looked (a bit) for a pattern in the errors and didn't find one, and wondered whether I'd provoked the problem by some sort of mishandling but couldn't see how; then while calming down with a cuppa, figured out an alternative approach, which raised another question - can I configure my settings to record off of a disc player in my computer straight into RB? (Don't have an external one that I could connect through my interface.) Seems like it should be quite possible but I couldn't think how, so I put a (stereo) lead from an interface output back into an input, and that worked fine; everything went onto a single track like I required from the start and just a little cutting of track gaps remained.
The job's done now but the frustration of RB not doing what I think it should remains, and I know I'm going to need those functions down the track so has anybody got any clues for me?

Clinton.