Some strings in Foobar Diskwriter (CLI) won't work without the "-o" parameter; sometimes the format has to be "- -o".

What is it and what does it do?

Thanks!

~esa

Some commandline encoders require "-o" for output option.

Thanks for the reply...
So "-o" is for "output"? What does that mean?

Why is it not needed with other frontends?

Why does FLAC need it in Foobar, but WavPack doesn't?

Why is the format sometimes "-o", and other times "- -o"?

The single - are an established standard used for stdin and stdout.

Hi there,

I'm using EAC with LAME 3.97b1 to encode to MP3 with this command line:
-V 2 --vbr-new --noreplaygain --ignore-tag-errors --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" --tg "%m" %s %d

I also wanted to use ALL2LAME with LAME 3.97b1 with EAC's command line but I couldn't do it. I think the problem is %s %d 'cause when I deleted it, I could encode just fine.

Does anybody know how to correct my command line in order to use it with ALL2LAME ? Should I use %s %d in ALL2LAME also?

Thank you.

EDIT: OK, I figured this out, %s %d was the problem, that's only for EAC.
My new command line is: -V 2 --vbr-new --noreplaygain

It's just how the developer of the application chooses to do things. It may be that in FLAC you can pass multiple files to encode using "... file1.wav file2.wav file3.wav" whereas WavPack you use "... *.wav". This may not actually be the case for these apps, but it still rings true as an explanation as to why command lines work differently - it's because different developers use different techniques.


If you see "- -o" then the input is STDIN (the "-") and the output is being specified ("-o"), e.g.:

FLAC - -o output.flac

If you see "-o" and there are no "-" on their own a wave file has been passed elsewhere, e.g.:

FLAC -o output.flac input.wav

Bear in mind also that the -o switch can move around, so you won't always see "- -o", e.g.:

FLAC -o output.flac -V -T "COMMENT=Testing" -

Thanks for the detailed explanation, Synthetic Soul!