I am new to this board and am hoping someone might be able to help me out.

I am using CDex to rip my cd's to hard drive. I am using Lame 3.90.3 and it says version 1.32 engine engine 3.90 MMX.

I have been using --alt-preset standard to rip the mp3's but was reading here yesturday about using --alt-preset standard -Y. My qustion is this, how do I set the "-Y"? I have no idea how do do this. Do I need to download something that I do not have?

Thank-you for your help!!

Lon


edit: alt-present to --alt-preset

Counterquestion: What do you want to achieve with -Y? I'm asking because i think you might have misunderstood something.

It is very possible that I am misunderstanding something!! I was reading that by adding the -Y I could decrease the size of the ripped mp3 file at the expense of losing freqs over 16Khz. This would make it possible to get more music on my player. Did I miss something? I am very new to this and am learning.

Thanks,
Lon

It probably wouldn't make it much smaller. It'd probably just use the about the same number of bits but pay more attention to the lower freqs.

Basically, try it and see. For a portable player, you can really drop the quality of the audio without even noticing it, due to the typical noisy environment, the low quality ear-bud headphones usually included, etc.

Also, I thought (perhaps in error!) that when you use the alt-presets, LAME ignores any other switch on the command line. It overrides everything else.


Another good question, somewhat related, is *what* switches are the -alt-presets already using.

Not every front end to lame or cd ripper gives access to the manual settings. Instead they just give a list of options to enable and the user has to guess what might sound good.

Some cd rippers are truely horrendous. For example, Nero's PowerPack includes a free frontend to LAME (just requires a free web registration to get the serial number to activate it), so you can rip audio cd's and encode them with lame. Great in theory, but they don't give access to the presets at all. Or even any way to enter switches. Of course, that's a different subject than what you were talking about.

No, this is correct. -Y is useful for portable players. Although the size decrease also depends on the type of music you encode.



It uses not only switches, but also calls sourcecode optimizations that can't be accessed via command-line switches. Thus, it's impossible to recreate for example --alt-preset standard with normal non-"alt-preset" switches.

So, can someone please tell me if it is possible to set this -Y switch while using CDex? Or do I need to download a different version of LAME.

Thanks,

Lon

CDex by default uses Lame.dll (I forget which version number).

You need to be using the executable to use switches.