Thanks for all the feedback. I was using "id3ed" and "easytag" under Linux, both of which seem to only support v1 and v1.1 tags at the end of the file.

I'll try some of the utils mentioned here and see if that helps.

Stripping the 128bytes off the head of the file didn't seem to affect it playing on XMMS or on th Empeg unit, but it's nice to have a real solution. :)

thanks again
-s