I have my audio ripped to APE, and wanted to transcode to LAME. Despite much searching around on the Foobar site and forums, I couldn't find out how to do this. Eventually, I came across a third party Diskwriter component called CLI encoder on www.saunalahti.fi, and after installing it I was able to do what I wanted to.

However, I have no idea if this is the recommended way to achieve transcoding to LAME. I couldn't find any official or unofficial documentation describing how to go about it. So I'm wondering if using the CLI encoder is in fact not the best way of going about it.

So if anyone can either confirm I've done this right, or tell me how to do it if it's wrong, I would be very grateful. Thanks.

As far as I am aware you have done what you can.

The CLI encoder, it appears to me, is a Diskwriter component that allows you to use Diskwriter to call any external encoder from a Command Line Interface. You can get other Diskwriter components, like foo_monkey, where it is all done through the DLL.

I assume you chose a profile from "Components" > "Diskwriter" in options, selected the files in the playlist, right-clicked, and chose "Convert" > "Run conversion".

Cool isn't it?

Edit: grammar

Thanks for the reassurance.

And yes, it is a cool component. What's particularly impressive is that the conversion progress bar still seems to work. How can this diskwriter component, which is handing off the encoding process to a third party black-box, possibly know how far it's got? Spooky (cue twilight-zone FX).

Because it knows how much data it has written to the pipe that the encoder is reading from.

Ah, of course. I hadn't twigged that it was feeding LAME's stdin rather than creating a temporary file. (But on reflection, it had to be doing that, since the MP3 file starts getting created straight away). My apologies for being so dense.