Over the last month or so, I've been re-ripping my music to FLAC, and then transcoding to MP3 for transfer to the player.

I've run into a problem: emplode (and Rio Music Manager) are getting the bitrate wrong on these files. Windows Media Player reckons that they're around 115Kbps VBR, but emplode and RMM think that they're (e.g.) 32Kbps CBR.

This initially made me think that I had imminent hard disk failure. Because the bitrate is so totally wrong, the player doesn't seem to be caching enough of the track, and is getting caught out. Since my disk is taking a little while than longer to spin up, this is causing glitches in the music.

This is on my (unmodified) mk2a, running v3a8.

I'm using FLAC 1.1.1 and LAME 3.96.1 on Windows. I'm piping the output of FLAC into LAME, as follows:

flac -s -cd foo.wav | lame --quiet --preset standard - > foo.mp3

Ideas?