Hi,

I just made this discovery, found initially from another message board. I'm using EAC and Audiograbber and lame 3.90.3 alt-preset extreme (user defined).

Why does AG produce significantly smaller MP3 file sizes than EAC, regardless of extraction mode, normalizing?

Also, when I decompressed the files and compared both of them using EAC and AG file compare, they don't detect any offsets, and the file sizes are the same?

Please help to explain! Cheers!

Are you sure you're using LAME 3.90.3 through Audiograbber? I don't use AG since a loooooooooong time, so I can't help on how you would configure AG for that. And also, are you sure AG is not passing some extra parameter to LAME?

The length of the two UNCOMPRESSED version is the same because the length (in time) of the track is by definition the same and the size of an uncompressed PCM file is fixed for a given amount of time. In the case of CD-Audio it is:

16 bit per sample x 2 channels x 44100 samples/second = 1411200 bits/second (or 176400 byte/second)

Small differences can exist because of the WAV file header.

If you are normalizing tracks, buddy, you're doing a real bad bad thing... completely loosing the volume differences between different tracks of an album.

Also if you really don't have offset differences between AG and EAC that should probably means that you're not exploiting the offset correction capsbilities of EAC (unless your CD drive happens to have a 0 offset, and I'm not aware of any that does).

You would probably search for past post about those issues and also give a deep look at the EAC configuration pages that you can find at the The Coaster Factory

Sergio

Yes, I'm pretty I'm using LAME 3.90.3 thru' AG. I've set the options to user defined, and set the path of the LAME exe file, unless there's something I'm doing that's wrong and I'm not aware of it. I mean the options are pretty seft-explainatory, like in EAC. I don't think AG should be adding any extra parameter to LAME since I selected the drop-down option for user-defined; shouldn't any parameter be over-riden then?

OIC, so there aren't differences between both of those files, so the WAVE file header are the same then.

Is using normalizing really that bad? I understand that I'll lose volume differences between tracks in that album, but at the same time I hate having to re-adjust the volume every time it gets too loud of soft. I do disable that function when I'm ripping live, concert or continuous tracked album though.

BTW, what's an offset? I my Lite-On drives are capable of error correction and I enable those functions in the EAC options.

I use EAC for sometime now because of the higher quality rips, but if I'm finding that it makes larger MP3 files, I may only use it for ripping and not for its compression options for LAME.

I'll try to ask someone at the coaster factory for some answers.

Sorry, not much time now....



The solution to your problem is replaygain/mp3gain... dig into HA forums....

Sorry again...

Sergio

I've had some time and tried to reproduce your issues. And I can't. Both rippers work as they suppose to, giving identical output.

What are the exact commands you are passing to the external encoder?

Hie, thanks for all of your replies. Someone else on the EAC problems seem to be having the problem, and when I tried to experiment, I seem to have it as well!

I think since both wav. files are the same, it must the MP3 compression options, that's causing the different output sizes.

OK, in AG (ver.1.83 freeware):
- Grab to: MP3 files via intermedia wave file, delete wave file.
- Use ID3 v.1 tag
-




OK..... I see the problem.....

Silly me!!

I was using LAME ver.3.95 in AG! I thought I had changed it to ver.3.90.3. So, the latest version produces smaller sized files.

Thanks for all your help anyways!