Hi Guys
Looks like a great forum looking to get back into mp3 encoding seeing as I'm about to get a nice mp3 headunit for my car. Now from my passed experience (over a year ago) EAC and Lame are the best for high quality encodes. After going through the forum I found easylame which came recommended and gave it a shot and it was brilliantly easy to use with high quality. My only problem being I can't find a setting to include id3 tags in the encoded mp3's. I can get them if I encode with eac but if I can get them working in easylame it's a big bonus. So am I missing something obvious (command line?) or can't it be done with easylame. Thanks in advance

Nope, RazorLame (the frontend) doesn't support ID3 tags. You'd have to add them afterwards (based on the information contained in the filename and folder structure) using Tag, or any other good MP3 tagger.

But if you rip to MP3 with EAC directly, why do you need EasyLAME anyway? You can ditch it. Using custom command lines, you can add whatever tags you like through EAC. Here's a command line that adds ID3v2 tags only (use the User Defined encoder option, and disable EAC's own tagging option for it to work):

--alt-preset standard --id3v2-only --pad-id3v2 --tt "%t" --ta "%a" --tl "%g" - -ty "%y" --tn "%n" --tg "%m" %s %d

If I were familiar with Delphi and had more than the 6.0 personal edition (which doesn't seem to work with some of the components that the RazorLame source code requires), I'd try to add ID3 support myself, but until I get off my ass and learn these things, I'm afraid that's a distant prospect.

If you need an encoder frontend anyhow, I'd recommend Frontah (only works with Win2k/XP) which is a lot better than RazorLame will ever be, and it supports proper tagging. If you're on Win9x, you can use one of Speek's frontends (All2Lame or Multi Frontend), but you will only be able to add ID3v1 tags with these.

Hi Volcano thankyou very much for your answer greatly appreciated. Ok the reason I was using a frontend was so I could rip all the cd's into wav format using eac and then batch process them into mp3's at a later stage using easylame. I'll have to have a look around in EAC and see if there is an option for this. Just one more quick thing if I use the command line you posted does it overwrite any of the other settings i.e tick boxes in eac?

thanks again

Ah I see, that makes sense. Well then, what I'd do if I were you:

- Configure EAC to rip to a lossless format, for example WavPack, using APEv2 tags (it won't affect your ripping time, because it encodes much much faster than your drive rips). Refer to Case's quick tutorial for this.

- Set EAC up to place all files into one folder (use any file naming scheme you want, for example "%N - %T").

- For encoding the files to MP3, use dBpowerAMP - it will copy the tags from the WavPack files, and you can tell it to use ID3v2 or ID3v1 tags (or both). You will also have to install the WavPack codec, and I'd recommend copying the v3.90.3 lame_enc.dll over the 3.92 one located in dBpowerAMP\Compression\Lame (beware, any new dBpowerAMP version will overwrite it with the 3.92 DLL again), as it provides potentially higher quality if you use the --alt-preset standard setting.

- Once you've encoded the MP3 files, use the shell extension I made to rename the MP3 files and sort them into subdirectories. You have to modify some lines slightly for it to work with MP3 files (replace *.mpc with *.mp3, remove the replaygain lines, etc.), but I guess you'll figure that out.

Hope this helps a bit. It sounds messy and complicated, but in reality, it's not. The main advantage is that the WavPack files contain tags which can simply be copied to the MP3 files - this is not the case with plain WAV files, so you'd have to mess around with tagging from filename if you ripped to WAV.

I do it similarly myself, and it works like a charm.




I think it's the other way round, at least for the tagging. If you specify ID3v2 tagging in the command line, enabling tagging in EAC will override that and ID3v1 tags will be added additionally, which that command line is trying to avoid.

The other options (bitrate, high quality/low quality, CRC) are ignored anyway if you use the "User Defined Encoder" option (which you should if you're using LAME).

thankyou very much volcano I will sit down and try to absorb all of that now

Volcano, a quick query:
Why do you encode to wavpack at all? Is it just a lot faster to encode than Lame?
It just seems that it is easier just to go straight to MP3 from EAC.

I recommended that because dcourtney said he wanted to rip a bunch of CDs to WAV, and batch encode them to MP3 at a later time. Because of the tagging issue, using WavPack is more convenient in this case.

Otherwise, encoding to MP3 straight from EAC is the obvious solution, of course