Ogg encoding puzzle [Partially solved]

[Steve Grace]

On Sat, 2007-06-23 at 13:19 +0100, David Fletcher wrote:
> On Thursday 21 Jun 2007, David Fletcher wrote:
> > Here's what seems to me to be a really weird problem.
> >
> > I've got two PCs. The old PC is a celeron 600 running Dapper. The newer PC
> > is a P4 running Feisty and has a SATA optical drive.
> >
> > And my wife has a iAUDIO branded flash portable music player I bought her
> > for Christmas, because it can play Ogg Vorbis files.
> >
> > If I rip and encode a CD using the old PC, scp them over to the new PC so
> > that I can get at the USB sockets and copy them to the music player, it
> > plays.
> >
> > If I rip and encode with the new PC, copy the files to the music player, it
> > sees the files, shows titles, but no sound. But I'm using the new PC to
> > play ogg files encoded on the new PC right now and it sounds fine.
> >
> > There was a difference in the encoder command line in grip. I've set the
> > new PC to match the old PC but it still won't work on the portable player.
> >
> > BTW I also started having problems playing tracks at the office, using the
> > ogg codec for Windows Media Player. The old files play OK but the new ones
> > don't.
> 
> I tried creating a new account on the P4 machine, and ran grip from there. 
> Using the new account the tracks I rip and ogg encode work on both the PC and 
> the iAUDIO player.
> 
> OK I thought, must be some incompatible configuration that came over with my 
> home folder from Fedora. So next I tried deleting all the .grip* files from 
> my normal home folder. Ran and configured grip again, but the files STILL 
> don't play on the iAUDIO.
> 
> Does anybody know if there's any other configuration information hidden away 
> anywhere?

I don't know if this will help, but I have a cheap music player that has
no trouble with ogg files encoded at quality level 0. However, I
accidentally encoded some files at quality level 3 (the default) and
found that only half of those played. The others showed a track length
of 00:00.

You seem concerned about a bad Grip configuration setting. What happens
if you encode ogg files from the command prompt instead of using Grip?

Steve