As the topic says, I am wondering if there is a way to keep digital silence from going down to pretty much a bottomed out bitrate. The problem is that I have an iriver flash based player and although it can handle that low of a bitrate, for some reason if the average bitrate drops below 96kbps for the whole song, it says NOT COMPATIBLE OGG FORMAT in GIGANTIC LETTERS on the display. My current solution is using CBR but I know that isn't very efficient, I'd love to be able to use the q# settings. Is there any way to do this at the command line?

Maybe you only need an alternate firmware.

I had the exact same problem, my solution was using this encoder. It has a hard minimum bitrate setting. Just add "-m 96" to the encoder and the bitrate never goes below 96 kbps. You may still enode at -q 2.

Look at Rare Wares for more info on the encoder.

Prefect