I have recently replaced my old Nomad IIc MP3 player with a shiny new iRiver iFP-799, since it was the first flash player I've seen that supports Vorbis files and has a good capacity. Unfortunately, my old time with Creative Jukebox has left me woefully unprepared for more advanced ripping. I've gotten the latest versions of EAC and aoTuV, and know the general steps of ripping from CD, but the devil's in the details and there's a lot of details to work out.

- Vorbisgain only works on players that recognize its tag, and I'm pretty positive that portable hardware players won't. What's the next best option for tweaking the file volume? I have zero desire to have to be constantly fiddling with the volume while playing songs. And, of course, I also have no desire to sacrifice audio quality in the process.

- Some of my CDs are mildly scratched, since I just put them in a slip binder after ripping to MP3. No huge gouges or anything like that, but scratches (silver side, not label side) aren't uncommon. In your opinions, will that have a significant impact on the quality of the output? I have one of the hand-crank CD polishers that I can use if need be, but I'd rather not use if it if isn't necessary.

- Are there any common pitfalls that I should look out for? I'm planning on encoding at quality 5, since I want the sound to be good without devouring too much space (and the iRiver can't handle Ogg Vorbis <95kbps or >225kbps in any event, so I'm trying to keep around the middle so the variable bitrate doesn't rise or fall outside of that range), but everything else is currently up in the air. And I'd rather find out now rather than after ripping a few dozen CDs that there was something I could've done better.

You could use wavegain to adjust the waves before encoding using Vorbis.



General cleaning is advisable, though if the scratches aren't lateral, EAC should be able to read it fine in secure mode. If it sits there too long, you could try burst mode which will sometimes 'cover up' the errors.



Since you have the bitrate limitation, I think you should be pretty safe with aoTuV at q 5. In contrast to GT3b2, I've rarely seen aoTuV have wild jumps in bitrate though it does depend on the content. For classical music, usually it doesnt even reach the nominal so you can use a higher q. For music with a lot of sharp attacks, the bitrate may peak, depending on the nature of the conent. The 128 kbps multformat test was done with aoTuV at q 4.35 I think and it ranked very well, so that might be an option. The other thing you could normally do is set bitrate management (min and max bitrate to your iRiver's range using -m and -M) but I've heard aoTuV doesnt work well with bitrate management.

for vorbis gain problem u could also do the foll

1. rip cd to flac in album/title gain mode.
2. use oggdropxpd to encode to vorbis and check the option which says USE FLAC ALBUM (or TITLE) Gain Tag to set Scale Factor automatically.
3. enjoy

for bitrate problem i think u are better off with aotuv at q 4.35
this should be the most appropriate setting for portable use and sounds good on the computer as well