Tony, in reponse....

1) I was using the highest VBR setting and the high freq enable bit turned on. I couldn't hear any badness with my old SB16+embedded PC setup but changing to the higher quality and I can hear the difference. If I have a friend in the car and I hear a bad one they think I'm making it up.... And ditto to the fact that my car is highest quality audio system I own.

2) I played around a lot with the settings but certain CDs (definitely not every one) always seem to give some problems. Generally they were older ones though (read this as "had more scratches" )

3) What I do for my tagging is I save the CDDB entries in my cdplayer.ini and fix them there. Then even if I rip again they will be right. Also CDex supports the year and genre from cdplayer.ini - if they aren't filled out I simply fix them up in CDex and select save to cdplayer.ini. It also correctly puts bad filename characters (like ? etc) in the ID3 and replaces them with underscores in the filename. It makes it a one step process.

I was also finding that audiocatalyst didn't seem to do the VBR headers correctly which also meant a pass through MP3TagStudio turning it into a 3 step process - I just don't like the way it works for ID3 tags (call me stubborn).

I can rip and not have to retag anything. At the moment Audiocatalyst requires me to rip the ID3 back from the filename, fix up bad characters etc and then write back. I find it very annoying...

As a whole I think Audiocatalyst is a very good product, it's just that I think you can do better with the completely free software available.