Excuse my ignorance, but are there benefits to encoding a full CD in one file and then splitting this file up into individual tracks?

It is only an advantage for continuous-track material, such as live concert albums or Pink Floyd albums. That's what the whole "gapless playback" discussion is about.

I'll rewind and give more history for you:

MP3 does not, by default, properly support gapless playback of continuous-track material. If you encode a set of separate .WAV files, there will be tiny bits of silence inserted into the actual MP3s themselves, at both the beginning and the end of each and every song.

This isn't because there's anything wrong with the .WAV files. The wave files will play back perfectly gapless. It's the process of ENCODING the files that inserts the bits of silence.

By creating a single huge MP3 file and splitting it, you are working around the problem of this inserted silence. Each split point is made on an exact frame boundary, and there is no artificial silence inserted at the beginning and end of each track.

There is still a drawback to this method, though, because the frames are often interdependent, relying upon a feature known as a "bit reservior" that stays active between frames. Decoders empty this bit reservior between files, which is the correct thing to do if the files weren't meant to be played in sequence.

Finally, many players artifically pause between tracks because they need CPU time to prepare the next file for playback.

So fixing gapless playback is a multi-faceted problem. The authors of the LAME encoder are currently working on a method to tackle it at the encoder level.

___________
Tony Fabris