>It does, but I've known files encoded that way to cause problems on
>playback in the past and wanted to avoid the possibility of one of
>mine giving people the hassle, so I don't use it.

I remember, several years ago I had an audio player that didn't handle variable bitrates well. It gave completely wrong playtimes for MP3s with VBR and seeking within such files was almost impossible. Nowadays that's not such a common problem anymore; most media players know how to handle VBR audio or video streams properly, scanning the encoded frames instead of simply dividing the file size by the bitrate of the first frame.

Nevertheless, you are right that MP3s with a constant bitrate are more straight-forward and less likely to cause conflicts. I only mentioned VBR as a possibility.

>... speaking of abstruse weirdness.

Heheheh! I suspected Audacity was one of the programs to which you were referring. It's a step up from using pure command-line tools like FFMPEG or BeSweet with a GUI frontend cobbled together by some other geek for his own purposes - but it's still miles away from intuitive or user-friendly.

WavePad also allows you to use VST plugins, but when I tried that with the "killerringer" DLL, the control window that popped up for it only contained a checkbox labelled "mute", rather than the three sliders you get when using it in Audacity.