You have to expect crap when people are ripping for target players with only little flash memory capacity. Plus people are using encoders like XING which are absolutely terrible compared to LAME and Fraunhoffer. Not to mention ripping on sub-standard drives with sub-standard programs. Not everyone knows about EAC and Audiograbber and to use Plextor drives.

Apart from the pops and skips you then also have incomplete files - I don't want to tell you how many of those I've checked out. I don't have broadband at home, so I don't make a habit of using the sharing apps. I grabbed some stuff from work a few weeks back over a period of a few days. Mostly just for preview purposes. Plus some tracks that I hadn't heard in 15 years or more. I stuck to only tracks above 128kbit. I tried to get them at 192 and above when possible. Barely any of them had complete file names or ID3 tags. The majority of them were listenable, but not of the quality that I've been encoding my own CD collection.

When you're getting stuff like this, I guess you have to take your chances and be patient. I didn't worry about it too much because I didn't intend for any of it to be archival. The missing ID3 tags were the worst problem, because I really wanted to know year and album info for a lot of the tracks - now it's off to allmusic.com to find out where to look for the tracks when purchasing.

Bruno