Okay, the complaint I've been reading here and there is that iTunes is cutting out silent parts of a track automatically. Naturally, I found this to be weird, so I asked for an example file. I was sent this file: http://otto.homedns.org/itunes/lesson23.rar (5 meg)

Right after he says "En Francais", there's supposed to be a silence there. Play it in Windows Media Player 10 and you hear it just fine. Play it in iTunes 5 and the silence is cut out.

But when I play the file in Quicktime Player, there's this loud clipping like noise just in front of the silent portion. I don't know a lot about the internals of the MP3 format, so I don't know what this could be. Ideas?