I am duty bound to start a thrad about the loudness war

I don't know that I would have noticed the noise, but smaller files is win. Thanks.

Note that it's not a huge difference - it's usually around 10 kbps at most, a trivial difference when you're dealing with FLAC files. Not enough for me to bother going back and re-fixing the albums I did before about the setting, in other words. But still, when you're working with entire albums' worth of music, it probably does add up after awhile.

Anyway, no problem.