I want to rip from after dinner to bedtime & compress while I sleep. My CD drive rips at about 8x with EAC and my CPU only runs LAME at a bit under 3x realtime, so I'd rather rip to WAV and get a bunch of discs fed through while I'm awake.

I started with EAC to WAV and RazorLame, but RazorLame doesn't tell LAME to add ID3 tags at all. Now I'm using All2LAME which will run TAG to parse filenames into tags. I have EAC write out filenames with artist-album-track-songtitle.

This works but for five problems:

1) missing fields screw up the parser. I wanted Genre & Year, but when they were missing, TAG got confused.

2) All2LAME doesn't have an option to delete the source files.

3) I can't use EAC's powerdown-when-done option (because I'm not done when ripping is done) and All2LAME doesn't have one.

4) I'd rather just feed discs & have everything happen automatically. It seems that starting the rip and clicking OK in the file dialog can't be shortcutted (I'd like AutoPlay to do it), but this adds a couple/three more steps.

5) Once All2LAME has built a batch file, you can't add to it.

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I described the problem to a colleage & he suggested a "LAME impersonator" that would be invoked by EAC, but would queue the work rather than doing it immediately.

A couple of names come to mind: procrastinator or squeeze you later.

The program would need options to re-parse the command line & invoke several commands. For instance:

procrastinate file.wav file.mp3 option1 option2 option3

might do
lame %1 %2 %3 %3 %4 %5
del %1

It's been a while since I did Windows programming, but this shouldn't be too hard. It seems that it'll take at least one separate thread for accepting queue submits and walking through the queue, executing commands. I'll need to start the procrastinate daemon (like crond), which ideally would report status through a GUI app, before beginning to rip.

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Does something like this already exists? (I'm using Windows 2000 & XP).

Maybe the Windows Task Scheduler can be used for it.

Any reason why EAC's queue isn't enough for your needs?

I suggest it that you rip to .cue/wav (this way you're going to get metadata from cddb written into the .cue file), and then use some application that can encode to mp3 and write the correct tags.

For encoding, I recommend foobar2000 with Case's clienc or foo_lame component.

Yeah, Task Scheduler should work, together with a script-"thingie".

You could easily use a perl-script for this - currently I just re-boot to linux and use a bash-script myself.

Where's that clue stick?

<whacks self>

Hmm... do I remember what RTFM stands for?

I've been running 0.9 beta 4.

Checking release notes for 0.9 beta 6....

"Queuing of compression tasks in the background on extraction (as option, need probably some tests)"

Thanks for the pointer tigre.

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<fter downloading & trying it out>

Does everything I want except #3- if I click the "power down after extraction" option, it powers down when the current disc is done, not when all queued compression is finished. I can deal with that, though I'm going to look into the power saving options on my computer. I don't think my hard drives are spinning down when they've been inactive for a long time.

The option was a little hard to find-- it's under EAC Options-->Tools tab, "On extraction, start external compressors queued in the background."

-M