The format is the problem, not the software that plays it. Ive emailed Franhauffer and heard from the person in charge of maintaining the lame source code. They both tell me the same thing. Theres nothing that can be done. I have the specifics somewhere, but I've posted them before. Some efforts were made to work on a nogap switch in lame, but its a pain to use and doesn't work very well anyway. There was talk (rumors) a few months ago about the main developers shutting down the lame project and moving on to a new format - most likely ogg. I'm not on the mp3 encoder mailing list anymore, so I don't know what theyre up to, but new versions are still coming out so they must be doing some work.

Sean