2 problems with Gnome sound-juicer

Recently I splashed out on an iRiver H340 music player. Which means my little computer has been constantly ripping my CDs to OGG format for the last three weeks. However I have noticed two problems.

(1) Sound-juicer sometimes cuts off the beginning of tracks.

The first OGG file will start some random number of seconds into the music, say for example, 27 seconds. The end of the file would then contain the first 27 seconds of the next track, and then the next track begins at 27 seconds into the next tune. And so on.

The delay doesn't happen on all CDs (but it's repeatable - the same CD will give the same error no matter how many times I've tried). There seems no way of predicting which CDs will rip properly and which will cut off the track beginnings. And the length of the delay seems random too. I have a DVD drive and a CD drive and it doesn't matter which one I use.

Doing it "manually" with cdparanoia and then oggenc has worked fine on the problem CDs. But this doesn't pick up the CDDB information automatically and it's just a big pain to rename everything. I wouldn't mind but I have hundreds of CDs I want to rip and so I want a totally automatic solution.

Is there a fix for this?

(2) How do you "concatenate" OGG files?

My iRiver player's one fault (it's brilliant otherwise) is that it can't play two tracks without a gap between them. So for dance mix tapes and some classical music it's not great. This would not be a problem for me if I knew how to just combine several OGG files into one (I normally listen to these things in one session anyway). Sound-juicer can't do this though.

What I want is a concatenate command that can deal with OGGs. A command-line solution would be fine for this problem, because I'd have to manually rename the files anyway.

Ideas anyone? I'm using Debian Sarge, though I haven't apt-get upgraded for several weeks. Guess that's one thing to try as soon as I get home from work.

I just gotta make sure you eliminated the possibility that cat might work... I know it works for most mpeg videos, but I don't know about ogg. I'd try it, but I'm too lazy.

OH MY GOD.

I am stupid. I just hadn't got the syntax of cat right:

cat track01.ogg >> mixcd.ogg
cat track02.ogg >> mixcd.ogg

...and so on, actually works, AND it preserves the separate title, artist and album data. A quick FOR loop in a shell script would do the trick for the whole mix CD:

for i in ./* ; do
cat "$i" >> mixcd.ogg
done

But what about the random cut-offs?

Well there's still a problem with the "cat" method of combining OGG files:

The above method works perfectly using the CLI command ogg123 to play the one big OGG file. There are no gaps between tracks, and when a new tune comes up, the new details are printed up on the console. Excellent.

However, my iRIver only reads the details of the first tune, and still produces gaps between subsequent tunes even though it's all one big file. So on that score iRiver totally loses. Although the gaps this way are still smaller than using individual tracks, it must be said (definitely less than one second). Looks like the change in track details confuses the iRiver player.

Until IRiver decides to upgrade its firmware, then, I still need to work out how to concatenate OGG files, but IGNORE THE TRACK DETAILS. Ideas anyone?

Makes you wonder why iRiver didn't just use ogg123 to start with...