To begin with, I know I shouldn't use a version like this for anything but testing, but the response to 3.97a11 on these forums seemed to be quite positive. So I tried to download it from the rarewares debian-repository, but could only find the 3.97a11+cvs-version.

I was satisfied with the quality of the results. However, when I used mp3gain I noticed that all mp3s produced by this encoder version have global gain fields up to 255 in value. That means mp3gain wouldn't be able to raise the volume. It was not a real issue since all mp3s got their volume reduced, but I wonder why this behaviour has changed.

MedO