The ebuild for abcde lists media-sound/normalize as a hard dependency, but this is not true. abcde will work just fine without normalize. In fact, AFAICT abcde will not even use an installed normalize with Gentoo's default abcde.conf, unless the user uses the obscure (IMHO) command line switch -a. => The dependency should be optional. (I just tested this. I don't have normalize installed, only faked via package.provided to get abcde to emerge successfully, and I just ripped a CD without problems)
Matthias, you're right, thanks for catching that. Fixed in -r2