Having some lame weirdness.. Using the newest version of lame on my gentoo box, I'm getting a 32k mp3 when I try encoding a track from the new Velvet Revolver cd (ripped with cdparanoia.) 3.96 is doing the same thing for me.

/usr/local/bin/lame --preset standard 11-slither.wav 11-slither_ps.mp3
LAME version 3.96.1 (http://lame.sourceforge.net/)
Using polyphase lowpass filter, transition band: 18671 Hz - 19205 Hz
Encoding 11-slither.wav to 11-slither_ps.mp3
Encoding as 44.1 kHz VBR(q=2) j-stereo MPEG-1 Layer III (ca. 7.3x) qval=3
Frame | CPU time/estim | REAL time/estim | play/CPU | ETA
9505/9507 (100%)| 0:10/ 0:10| 0:10/ 0:10| 24.295x| 0:00
32 [9507] ******************************************************************
128 [ 0]
160 [ 0]
192 [ 0]
224 [ 0]
256 [ 0]
320 [ 0]
average: 32.0 kbps MS: 9507 (100.0%)

Writing LAME Tag...done
ReplayGain: +51.0dB

Am I doing anything wrong?

any extra switches being used?

LAME uses 32kbps frames for digital silence. Have you listened to the WAV and confirmed that there's actually music in it?

The file consists of silence (see replaygain value, too).

According to the bitrate and to the RG value, I guess that your original wav files is pure (digital) silence. Did you check the .wav file?

Yeah, perhaps it's a copy-protected cd and you get digital silence when reading it ? (it happened to me too)

Ugh, I think you guys are right. I didn't even bother trying to listen to the wav files till now..

Someone pointed me to http://www.elis.rug.ac.be/~ronsse/cdfs/ but unfortunately it says CDFS crashes with kernels > 2.6.3 and I'm running 2.6.7. Blah!

Thanks everyone, though. I thought I was going crazy for a while

i also had this problem before, when i copied EAC folder (directory) from one machine to another ... the only solution was to delete de EAC folder, and do a "fresh copy", and configure ... it happened to me twice ... nothing to do with the file being encoded

Aha, so it turns out.. My cd rips were failing not because of some copy protection scheme, but due to some sort of kernel flakiness in linux. I reverted back to 2.6.5 instead of 2.6.7, and the cd rips fine (and thusly, lame works fine again.)