I've read about these settings on a million websites and what they do. NO where does ANYONE explain how the hell you use these settings. How come there is no help file or any explanation ANYWHERE on something so basic as this? I've done a million searches and all I ever find is --alt-preset extreme does this and --atl-preset insane does that, but no one even mentions how to apply them? This is craziness.

when you are encoding your file just specify the preset this way:

lame.exe --alt-preset standard yourfile.wav

where would I do this...I use EAC and basically I just point it to the CD drive and have it encode...I have no idea where I would "specify the preset"

Don't feel too bad - I'm guessing you just aren't familiar with using the command line. Typically, when specifying an executable (like lame.exe) at the command line, you can modify its behavior with "switches" (like --alt-preset standard). EAC borrows this command line behavior when you specify "Additional command line options" in the Compression options. To get the full effect of command line switches/options, I suggest setting EAC with the following options (all this is on the "External Compression" tab of the Compression options):

Check "Use external program for compression"
Parameter passing scheme: User defined encoder
Use file extension: .mp3
Program, including path, used for compression: C:\your\path\to\lame.exe
Additional command line options: --alt-preset standard --add-id3v2 --tt "%t" --ta "%a" --tl "%g" --tn "%n" --ty "%y" --tg "%m" %s %d
(the "alt preset" part is for the file quality, the rest of the switches are for file tagging, and the %s and %d specify the input and output file, respectively)

I hope this all makes more sense!

Ahh, thank you so much! That worked for me.

Ok, just one more newbie question
Which do I want, Stereo or Joint Stereo? I encode using Lame at 320kb with the alt-preset insane setting.

Joint stereo is proven to be better than pure stereo.

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