[BookSeeker]

I've tried asking this in a couple of the audiobook groups but have not had
any response, so I figured I try here. I'm new at this and I have some
questions about ripping and splitting - audiobooks in particular.

I notice some people rip by tracks on a CD, some people split by chapters,
and some people just rip these audio CD's into one file per CD. I have
been using CDex to rip each CD into one big wav file,and then encoding with
LAME. The problem with just ripping the tracks is that with most
audiobooks, a track can end in the middle of a sentence or even in the
middle of a word - but are invisible when you play the CD as one track just
runs directly into the next with out any pause or blank space. Any
suggestions on the best way to rip an audiobook?

Also, some of the books I get are already in mp3 format and I like
to split them when I listen on my MP3 player, (otherwise if I shut
it off I would have to fast forward through possibly hours of the
book to get to the place I left off). What is the best tool to use
to quickly and easly split mp3's?? Is there such a quick and easy
tool? I have tried a number of utilities I found with google, the
best I have found so far is "Audio Book Cutter" - but like others it
has a problem with MP3's that are VBR (it seems to work fine with
CBR).

When I split an MP3 that has VBR, and then play it back on my MP3 player,
its like the player can't always tell where the file is supposed to end so
often it will jump to the next section before the current section finishes.
I dont have this problem when I split files that have CBR.

To get around this problem I have been reencoding VBR to CBR using CDex.
Most audiobooks posted in the audiobook groups are encoded at 64-96 kbps
and when I reencode from VBR to CBR I use 128-192 kbps because, according
to what I've read, this is the best way to reencode to help reduce loss in
quality, (ie use a higher CBR when reencoding from VBR).

Any suggestions? I've just kinda been trying to figure all this stuff out
myself without much help.