[plug] mp3 downsizing

[Gavin Chester]

All the best to everyone for the coming new year (says he, avoiding all
secular and denominational argument concerning Christmas :-) )

I was wanting to know from mp3 gurus if there is a way to preserve the
id3 tag info on existing mp3s when downsizing/downsampling with LAME (or
suggest another encoder)?  I've tried looking to the mp3encoder list
(aligned with LAME), but it is almost stagnant with only a couple of
posting each of the last few months.  There was a posting in their
archives where the guy had exactly the same problem as me
(http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/mp3encoder/2001-January/001523.html),
but he didn't get a satisfactory answer back then.  Google also found
another mail list (http://www.neowin.net/forum/ snip - URL too long)
with the same story - again without a satisfactory answer.  If there is
another forum anyone can suggest I'll be happy to try there, too?

The scenario is that I have several thousand tracks burnt to a hard disk
at very high quality 256kbs.  I did it this way to then be flexible
about what I did with them next.  One of the things I now want to do is
to downsample those tracks to something more like 112kbs to suit burning
onto disk for a mp3-compatible car CD player.  

After googling and playing around I have discovered how to do the
downsampling from the command line using LAME with suitable options. 
Then I discovered the shell script available, MLAME.sh to batch process
the files instead of one at a time.  However, in all cases the
downsampling wipes the existing id3 info from each track. 

Any hints to how to get around that or pointers to where I might try to
find the answer?  Thanks people.

Regards, Gavin.

that I