one thing i did today was buy a external cd drive for my desktop computer (since i didnt have one in the drive bay to use). when i started to copy the cds to custom flac format i noticed something that might help me achieve better results. the relevance to the success of this sort of thing to the external cd drive was that the converted file was much louder than any flac file i used to customize over the original. the replay gain and loudness was louder. i tried a custom setup with gauss functions and then i thought that didnt sound all that good but i did think about removing the gauss functions and reconverting over the cd copy conversion. when i did that the sound came out interesting and dynamic and really turned out that it was just the success i was looking for in the acoustic quality. when you look at the flac command line program it says flac is used for '...analyzing FLAC streams'. that gave me some direction where if you think about it reconverting over and over keeps me going in a point of expressing that the flac data sort of stays the same but the files are 'iced' over (apodized) after reconversion. so if you ever think about trying something new, try converting first with gauss functions in your customization and then reconverting without the gauss functions. that might lead you to the same place i am at now, a really good direction for FLAC in my music life.