My friend Tod has discovered (as mentioned and confirmed in the Bug Reports section) that the empeg 2.0 player software has some decoder bugs when dealing with certain WMA files.

The reason he was encoding as WMA was because he uses Windows Media Player 9 on his PC and it's brain-dead easy to insert a disc and have WMP9 do all the work of encoding the file, tagging it, and putting it into his library. Basically he just sticks in the disc and WMP9 does everything else.

However, it seems that this file format is disliked by the empeg's WMA decoder.

Now, Tod hates dealing with new pieces of software and really doesn't feel like setting up and dealing with EAC. He'd rather use the "stick it in and forget it" WMP9 software that he's already using. Besides, he uses the WMP9 library features and wants to continue using them.

So, is there any way to make WMP9 use an MP3 encoder by default, perhaps some build of LAME that's easy to insert and install? When I look at the WMP9 options, it only offers WMA and WMA Variable Bitrate.

Note: His operating system is Windows 2000.