Paul P
I get the impression that you'd need something more like a Region FX that treats a track/bus as a whole and constantly updates and displays the loudness value for its contents.

 
Given that Cakewalk's devs are kinda the ARA experts these days, you might be on to something...if something could look at an entire region then I assume that would allow for aggregating the data. 
 
I think the only real downside of adding this feature is all the people who will complain that Cakewalk spent resources on something they personally don't need.
 
 
 

Anderton
 
I think the only real downside of adding this feature is all the people who will complain that Cakewalk spent resources on something they personally don't need.
 
 
 

I think this would be the result in any case

It evens out those big peaks in a wave file and can increase the volume without clipping.

I used Normalize on a track a few minutes ago.

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igiwigi
It evens out those big peaks in a wave file and can increase the volume without clipping.

That sounds more like limiting, not normalizing

Anderton
 
I use phrase-by-phrase normalization on vocals, which does most of what compression does without the pumping/breathing/artifacts. Then I need to add only a little limiting to give real presence to vocals. This is only one element in what I call creating "HD" vocals. I'll be introducing the full technique at this year's Sweetwater Gearfest during one of my workshops.
 
Normalization has a lot of uses beyond the traditional ones. On album projects I normalize all cuts, then upon listening to the album, reduce the level of tracks that sound too loud by comparison.
 

 
I do both of those things too. What you are calling "HD" vocals comes in really handy if you are given something like an interview in a single track where one person is WAY louder than the other one and they are never really talking at the same time. Normalizing just the lower person's voice lets you even it all out while still retaining the dynamics of both voices.

This is an old thread but after having a song mixed and mastered in Protools HD normalize was used and the effect was awesome.  Sine we have had many updates has a feature been created to replace or enhance the normalize feature?

To my knowledge, not within SONAR, but there are several wav editors available which can also be added to the utilities menu inside of SONAR. Some can be a bit clunky depending on what you are doing, but some also have batch functionality, so you can open them stand-alone and run all of the audio files in a project folder in one pass. This really depends on your intended application and how often you would use it - there are free and paid versions of software available. I happen to use Adobe Audition (already had it from years ago) because it also has a powerful noise reduction tool embedded into it that is useful in tandem with any type of normalization done.

BMOG
This is an old thread but after having a song mixed and mastered in Protools HD normalize was used and the effect was awesome.  Sine we have had many updates has a feature been created to replace or enhance the normalize feature?

In what way was the effect "awesome"? I'm struggling to imagine this. To normalise something is simply to either turn it up or down, relative to a reference level. That's it.