WAV editor - now about getting it to work?

[Lynn David Newton]

Thank you to all who responded to my inquiry about WAV
editors yesterday.

I don't think that any of the recommendations that came
in were for actual WAV editors, rather for ripping and
converting tools. Fine, because that's the task I'm
trying to accomplish.

First of all ... MP3 output is what I need, not OGG.
Not enough players support OGG yet. My task is to
deliver samples to Amazon and other distribution
services for my client's new double-CD release. MP3 is
required.

Three different people suggested GRIP. Excellent, I
already have that on my system. Thanks for the clue.

However, I'm having two major problems

Problem #1:

o When I try to listen to a track, there is NO SOUND!
  If I press the Play button, a track list appears, the
  first track is selected with a blue bar, and the bar
  just starts advancing down the track list, about one
  per second, until it gets to the end, then loops back
  to the top. No sound. No nothing. I finally made it
  stop, but I had to whack the stop and pause buttons a
  dozen times.

  All my other sound-playing stuff ... GTCD, the KDE CD
  player (whatever it's called), RealAudio, XMMS,
  RealAudio, etc., all work fine.

  Where this is particularly crucial is in ripping
  partial tracks:

  - Press the Rip tab on GRIP and click the Rip partial
    track button, to select any subset of sectors from
    a given track. There is a Play button, which should
    enable me to listen to the chunk I want to rip and
    encode to make sure I'm cutting in and out at
    exactly the right place. I *need* this Real Bad!
    But there is NO SOUND!

  - It *does* rip the file just fine, using whatever
    encoder I choose. One responder said that lame does
    a better job than bladeenc, so I've been using
    that. I haven't figured what tweaks, if any, might
    be appropriate to the command line options.

    The same person said Gogo is a much faster version
    of lame, but I don't have that.

  In summary, problem one is I need to know why GRIP
  will not *play* tracks.

Problem #2:

o Not a problem with GRIP itself, but it would be nice,
  rather than just dropping randomly into the middle of
  a segment, which is impossible to do smoothly, to be
  able to fade in and out at the beginning and end.
  Perhaps I do need an actual WAV editor to accomplish
  this after all?

Thank you all. I do genuinely appreciate the helpful
advice I get via the list from those who take the time
to respond. There is so much to know.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ