I have a lot of insanely low bitrate audio books on my MK2A player, and the player does not handle them gracefully.

These files are downloaded from audiobooksforfree.com (I highly recommend this site if you haven't been there) and are encoded at 16 KB/sec constant bit rate. (That's not a misprint: 16 KB/sec!) The sound quality is poor, but listenable with a couple of the EQ bands attenuated by a full 30dB.

The player does not do a good job of keeping track of where it is in these files if the player is powered down during play. When powered back up, perhaps 1/4 of the time it will start up where it left off; perhaps half the time it will start up wherever it started last time; and the remaining quarter of the time it will start at some random location within the file.

Much of the time, the FF/REW buttons will not function in these files. And on the occasions when the FF/REW buttons do work, the time-elapsed/time-remaining counters are bogus: if I am playing a 15 minute file and play it to completion the numbers will be fine. But if I FF in the file, the actual placement in the file will be about double what the elapsed-time counter shows, that is I will actually be seven minutes into the play time of the file when the counter shows three and a half minutes.

I only experience these problems with the 16 KB/sec files; music files encoded at a more reasonable rate perform normally.

Does anybody else have extremely low bitrate files?

tanstaafl.