Tony, your testing with LAME, I'm wondering...

I seem to recall that LAME 3.90 alpha needed a bit of coaxing in order to properly do its gapless-ing job. Most notably, it wasn't enought to go:

LAME --nogap filename1
LAME --nogap filename2
LAME --nogap filename3

Instead, you had to go:

LAME --nogap filename1 filename2 filename3

That way it could do the necessary work handling the ins and outs of each file. The problem (at least when I messed with it) was that the syntax parser wasn't completely up to the task of properly handling all the usual command line parameters you normally throw onto the command line when you were doing the nogap stuff. I remember I even had trouble with certain file names and I had to pare them down to a simple track01 track02 track03 and couldn't specify the destination file names at all. I also noticed I couldn't get the quality and bitrate options to work, I had to take everything at the defaults.

It it possible you just weren't feeding it the proper command line to get it to work?

Because when I tried it, it "worked", it just wasn't yet perfect. It was better than a standard encoder, but not as good as my hand-trimmed copy of Dark Side of the Moon.