hi, let me start by wishing everyone a happy new year. I've been lurking around here for a while and this is a great site. a wealth of information from a lot of very knowledgeable people.now to my question. i am using the lameacm codec to rip Cd's to mp3 with windows media player9. the only problem and I'm not so sure it's a problem is there are 3 settings in the codec to choose from stereo, joint stereo and dual channel. no matter which one i select every song ripped shows up as joint stereo. is there any way to remedy that besides using eac or another program. thank you

Are you aware that the files you are producing this way are .WAV files containing a MP3 audio stream, and not real .mp3 files ? Renaming them to .mp3 doesnt help you here a lot, they still stay WAV files ....

I would recommend to you to use Foobar2000 for this purpose, its coming with a nice LAME MP3 encoder outputing valid MP3 files.

Christian
matroska project admin

hi christian thanks for the quick reply. know i was not aware of that. they are showing up as mp3 files

just for the record. When it comes to LAME you should always use Joint-Stereo! No matter what setting or bitrate! It will NOT destroy the stereo effect (it will be the same like on the original source), but rather results either better quality or smaller filesize depending on your setting...

If you are ok with bitrates ~200kbps, I strongly recommend you to use --preset standard and LAME 3.96.1

update. i checked the song with encspot and it listed fraunhoffer as the encoder used. in the windows media player options i had the lameacm codec selected. so i disabled the fraunhoffer codec and ripped the song again. the song was unlistenable. being that media player 9 does not support ripping to mp3 and the lameacm showed up in windows media player and there were mp3 encoding settings in the registry how did it rip with fraunhoffer encoder or even rip at all. it would have been nice to be able to use the lame encoder in media player.

As i told you already, any ACM ( Audio Codec Manager ) and VCM ( Video Codec Manager ) can only be used from Video for Windows ( VfW ) based programs, and the only output containers for VfW are WAV and AVI.

You cant produce valid MP3 files using an ACM codec, at least not with a standard VfW tool like Windows Mediaencoder ....