v2final and v3a3 still dont seek these well. if i'm playing it... and then hit pause... it skips to a different section where i stopped... very strange stuff. anyway, here's the table which lame --longhelp gives for people trying to do lowbitrate/samplerate rips.

MPEG-1 layer III sample frequencies (kHz): 32 48 44.1
bitrates (kbps): 32 40 48 56 64 80 96 112 128 160 192 224 256 320

MPEG-2 layer III sample frequencies (kHz): 16 24 22.05
bitrates (kbps): 8 16 24 32 40 48 56 64 80 96 112 128 144 160

MPEG-2.5 layer III sample frequencies (kHz): 8 12 11.025
bitrates (kbps): 8 16 24 32 40 48 56 64 80 96 112 128 144 160

so lowest acceptible bitrate/sampletrate is 32/32000, which i'm encoding at this very minute. hopefully it works well. on a sidenote, upsampling and using vbr at the same time makes lame go crazy. no histogram, and full cpu usage...

Does fixing the VBR headers first make any difference on the player?

As in, "mp3tool --repair xxxxx.mp3"

-ml

theres actually a combination of things. i was doing mpeg2.5 L3 VBR files, which both had bugs, but were fixed recently

1) if i encoded it CBR but kept it mpeg2.5, it would still do the same (fixed in v3a5)
2) if i encoded it VBR and upscaled it to mpeg1, then it would lose it also (fixed in jemplode50 when it finally started to calculate the right length).

so the combination of having wrong seeks already from mpeg2.5, and wrong song length just made this thing way off. it would FF me like 7 minutes in a 80 minute lecture if i paused then unpaused. but ever since both fixes were implemented, its been fine.