Unit: MK2a/beta2.0-11 consumer
1. Some songs I play on the RIO have LARGE BLASTS of static, some lasting almost 1 sec. I play the source file in winamp and I don't hear it (though there may be a flat spot in the song). I'm not sure what to do. I'm using Audiograbber with the LAME encoder @ 192/dual channel sterio + normalization. I use W2Kpro, system is 1.5GHz + 7xxMB RAM. How can I make it go away? Please, DON'T say RTFM. I've done the FAQ, it doesn't QUITE cover this.

2. Sometimes during playback the buttons lock up. The player keeps playing, screen keeps doing it's thing but the buttons don't have ANY effect. After a while (I went away for 15 min and came back) they work again as if nothing was wrong. I've noticed this symptom with the retail image and the beta11 dev image as well. It's really irritating. If I wanted Window$ reliability I'd have bought an Auto PC.

3. This is related to 1. Does anyone know if Winamp silences bad static? If so, how about an update for the decoder that does the same? Anyone feel like writing one? Better yet, an analysis of the songs b4 they are sent to the player. A little box that enables "check for possible encoding errors". That should be comparatively easy.

1) The file is bad. There is something corrupt in the file. Re-rip the file from its original CD again to fix the problem.

2) This is a known bug in Beta 11. Download and install the Hijack kernel (link at the top of this page) to fix the bug temporarily until the next software release.

3) Different decoders will behave differently (unpredictably) on bad files. If Winamp plays silence on the bad frames, that's just a feature of its decoder. It's not "muting" anything, it's just choosing not to decode the bad frames.

If you wish to check a file for bad frames, use MP3Trim.

I could NOT get AudioGrabber with Win2K to not give me random pops. Even with a 3rd party ASPI manager installed. I switched to to EAC and have had ZERO problems. Honestly, you don't notice as much on Winamp unless you have headphones.

thanks. I'll try EAC tomorrow