Help w/ I-Pod

[ForeverAutumn]

It should but you may want to upgrade to a new iPod just for the gapless playback. Very nice to hear tracks that flow together with no pause in between
No, you only need Gold to do the on-the-fly transcodes. For ripping the free version is all you need. You may want to check if there are any updates or newer builds. Anyway, go to Rip CD > Format > mp3 > settings. It should be in there. If not you may need to update MM. Please note this will slow down your rip time considerably but the results are well worth it.

Extreme VBR @ 256 is quite good as well but I hear less encoding artifacts with V0 and the files end up being a bit smaller (most songs end up being in the 200-220 kb/s range but I've seen some as low as 135 and others as high as 300).

Thanks for the help. I'm going to try this on my 4th gen. But you've given me some good reasons to upgrade too. Bigger files means that I'll probably want to go from a 40G to an 80G iPod sooner.

Edit: The secret to finding Lame VO @245kb/s is to change to Manual Settings.