I'm encoding my CDs with Lame 3.92 --alt preset extreme.
Thats OK for my archiv and my harddisk.
But when I use the mp3-files in my MP3-Player with an CF-Card
or on a CD-RW for my Car-Player there is not enough memory
for these very good, but very large files.
I have the EXTREME-files on my harddisk and I want to trancode
them directly (? is this english) into a lower quality in a separate
directory and I need the Tag-Information in these new files.

For EXAMPLE "from alt preset extreme to alt preset standart" or
"from alt preset extreme in preset 128" ....

Can I use EAC, Lame ... ?
What can I do ??

I just want to warn you ahead of time, re-encoding from --ap extreme to --ap standard is going to sound a lot worse than just encoding from the source to --ap standard. But for portable, on-the-go listening, going MP3-to-MP3 will suffice (you can still make out the music )

I used a program called vbLamer to re-enccode ~300 albums into thumbnail quality for undisclosed purposes , and that worked well for me; you drag MP3's onto it, then it creates a subdirectory called mp3_lowbitrate or something, and puts all the re-encoded songs in there, with the same filename, but without the ID3 tags.

I couldn't find a vbLamer download anywhere, since the homepage seems to have disappeared. If you can give me your email address, either in this thread or in a private message, I'll send it to you as an email attachment.

This is the descendant of vbLamer, WAV2LAME:
http://home.wanadoo.nl/~w.speek/w2l.htm

Don't forget that you can simply specify a mp3 file as input to lame just like any wav file.

transcoding and keeping ID3Tags....

In list of recommended MP3 settings you will find the method.

Monkeys Audio !

If you're needing to encode to --alt-preset standard bitrates later, then there's no reason in using --alt-preset extreme at all.

And as SometimesWarrior said, transcoding between these 2 will sound horrible.

As I've said before, and this is really no joke people, --alt-preset extreme really doesn't offer any true benefits in sound quality across the board. It sounds a tiny, little, ever so subtle bit better on some of the samples the --alt-presets still have problems with, but those samples don't sound perfect anyway, and the improvement extreme offers is almost negligible. The only reason I offered this preset is because I knew that no matter how good --alt-preset standard sounded, people would think they needed more (without doing listening tests). So instead of having them use something which is likely to decrease quality, I made a preset which doesn't really offer much of an increase in quality (because it's not really possible to do this without internal changes to lame), but also doesn't decrease quality.

So if you're needing to transcode later, do yourself a favor and just use --alt-preset standard in the first place. Remember, this preset was already designed to sound nearly as perfect as possible with a vbr preset. I'm not really sure why so many people think it's not good enough and must use extreme. I'm almost certain this notion isn't based on listening tests... and I know this from all of the testing I originally did myself.

Quote Dibrom:
"So if you're needing to transcode later, do yourself a favor and just use --alt-preset standard in the first place. Remember, this preset was already designed to sound nearly as perfect as possible with a vbr preset. I'm not really sure why so many people think it's not good enough and must use extreme. I'm almost certain this notion isn't based on listening tests... and I know this from all of the testing I originally did myself. "


I believe that as long as there are presets named "extreme" , "super-duper" , "audiofreak" , "diamond-ears" etc., people will always have the urge to use them instead of the "standard" ones. No matter how many times it is stated that they are overkill, the word BETTER flashes in everybody's mind. Don't be surprised that people don't stick to standard, it's more a matter of psychology than anything else.



there's was no way I wouldn't have this ninja icon in this post somewhere