I totally agree, Kureg. I much prefer to encode my own MP3's, for precisely the reasons you listed. What few songs I have downloaded, have been plagued by ripping or encoding problems. Or worse, they weren't even digitally extracted, they were sampled with a cheap soundcard, either off of vinyl or off of an audio CD.

The ideal situation would be to have the artists creating their own MP3s and selling them over the internet. The technical advantages to doing this are:

1) They can control the quality of the MP3 files to their standards.
2) The MP3s can come from their original digital stereo master instead of from a record-company mastered CD (which is sometimes butchered by the mastering process).
3) They can embed the correct tag data, for instance, spelling the song title correctly.
4) They could use the ID3v2 tag spec to insert correct lyrics and production credits. I'm still waiting for the day when my Empeg scrolls the lyrics by on the screen as the song plays.

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Tony Fabris