Hi all of you. I have question for you guys. I want know while my mp3 is in progress encoding can i browse internet or listen internet radio? das it going to effect on quality mp3? I'm using Lame 3.90.3 for encoding and this is my command line -b 128 -m j -h -V 0 -B 320 -q 2 --alt-preset standard. Thanks.

Yes, you can use the computer for other things without affecting the encoding.
Your command line is the same as '--alt-preset standard' alone except for the -V 0 switch, It's been tested that -V 0 is lower or equal quality than -V 2, so you'd better use '--alt-preset standard' alone.

Indeed the quality won't be affected... however due to the usage of the CPU, the encoding may take longer if your computer is not very fast.

If I could expand on this question a bit, this thread is talking about
encoding, but does the same hold true relative to ripping?
I was under the impression that you shouldn't ask the cpu to do
much, if anything else, while actually extracting the data from the CD.

Thanks, Dex

This should be easy enough to test. Simply rip a wav file under heavy load (i.e., tons of stuff going on, like mp3 encoding, ape decompressing, internet downloading, word documents loaded up, etc...), and then rip the same wav file under very low/no load (after a clean boot). Compare the two files using EAC to see if there are any differences. I doubt there will be, but you never know.

On the related topic, prior to buffer underrun protection on most modern CD-R/W drives, it was common practice to burn under a low load environment. Ripping under heavy load never caused me any problems, but I always made sure when I was burning to keep other activity at a minimum. With today's buffer protection, that's no longer necessary (on most drives). Today I rip/encode/burn without worrying too much about CPU load.

Daffy

Dude, drop all of that except for the --alt-preset standard. Frankly, it does all of it (except the -V 0) already, and adding things like -V 0 will break the preset, resulting in larger files with most likely worse artifacts.

And no, doing other things while you encode won't affect the mp3 at all structure-wise. It'll just slow down the encode a bit.