In reply to:

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wouldn't taking an already very low quality MP3 file and re-encoding it only make it sound worse?

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As Bitt says, it will reduce the fidelity, which may or may not make it sound worse. But I was proposing this as a test, rather than as a solution. If we can work out exactly what it is that causes problems for the player, we might be able to offer more detailed and constructive comments to the Empeg team and/or the decoder developers. More constructive than "it don't work", I hope.