Anyway, gapless mp3 encoding/playback definitely seems to be progressing, but I may just re-rip my continuous material cd's to wav's anyway, since I have the space available (at least for now

I'm not about to go that far, space is at a premium right now. I will await LAME's improvements to --nogap, or hope that someone else unlocks a foolproof method to create gapless MP3's. Or maybe the WMA format will bail us out, the Empeg guys claim that WMA is coming Real Soon Now. Then I'll re-rip all my continuous albums, and maybe my entire collection (I have access to a lab with about 15 PC's, so ripping all of my 300+ CD's is about six hours of work.)