I'm shocked that the format doesn't allow for "only the first/last x resultant samples of this frame should be played"... I (obviously from the above comments) have no actual knowledge of the spec. Is there anyone here who knows?

The details of how a given frame are encoded differ among implmentations (the better ones, such as Fraunhofer or Xing are patented). But the specs for the frame headers have been reverse-engineered and published in several places. The reference I use is here.

Basically, what it comes down to, is that each MP3 frame is an independent unit, containing barely enough header data to describe the bitrate/sample-rate/encoding-type of the frame. As far as I know, the information you describe isn't part of the header specification.

Like I said, I can work around it by hand-trimming the MP3 files, but the Empeg Car still leaves gaps...

-- Tony Fabris -- Empeg #144 --
Caution: Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.