Except that it doesn't do VBR or normalising.

Well, I don't have a problem with either of those things.

The storage on the car player is easy enough and inexpensive enough to upgrade, so although VBR is nice, it's not completely necessary. I'm quite happy with encoding at 256kbps-fixed on the HSX, the resulting files sound great on the car player.

And normalizing isn't an issue because (as far as I can tell), almost all of the CD's I've ever seen are already normalized. I get better results with Richard's dynamic volume adjustment than I ever could with normalizing.