Ok. I am new to the mp3 encoding/compression/etc. scene. I am a complete newbie but I've read alot about it all. Anyway, here's my story:

My friend ripped some valuable albums that we co-own into FLAC. He quickly describes the process as "I ripped it into raw wav using EAC, and then compressed into a lossless FLAC format."

Well I don't have infinite hard drive space, and LAME --alt-preset standard is good enough for me, so I was wondering how to convert FLAC into --aps. I read alot about it and tried it out, and it seemed to work, but I just want to check if I did things right before deleting the FLAC copies. This is what I did.

I downloaded "foobar2000". Dragged the flac into the window, selected them all, clicked convert, and picked "WAV" single-point or sometihng. Then I got a folder full of huge WAV files, which I assume were back in perfect CD-rip quality.

I then found and downloaded LAME 3.96.1 stable bundle.zip. I right clicked on some LAMEACM.inf file and clicked install, don't know what that did but it installed something. I then took both "lame.exe" and "lame_enc.dll" and dropped them into my windows system32 folder.

I opened command prompt, and typed "lame --alt-preset standard C:/WAV/song1.wav C:/WAV/song1.mp3" and hit enter. It took like 2 minutes and then finished. I checked the song using OIDUA and it said "-aps". I played it and it sounded pretty good.

So, did I do this right? And how can I encode an entire folder at 1 time? Thanks for any info you can give!

You did all technically right, but it'd be a lot easier to convert the FLACs in one step to mp3-s. foobar2000 can do this for you. Just put lame.exe in the foobar folder (I think that's the default place where fb2k looks for the encoders), and then select the "LAME" encoder preset when doing the conversion (instead of converting to WAV)

I hope this can be done easily with the default package, you should only need foo_clienc.dll in the components folder of foobar to accomplish this.

If something's not clear, feel free to ask. And anyone else feel free to correct me

EDIT:
Installing LAMEACM was not really necessary though...
And windows\system32 seems to be just as okay place for the lame executable as the foobar folder would be.

you did right. you could skip some steps next time.

How do I get LAME to work in foobar? I put lame.exe and it's dll into the main foobar folder but I can't find them in the program at all.

And also, how do you use lame on a whole directory?

1. Open foobar
2. Ctrl+P or Foobar -> Preferences in the main menu
3. Select diskwriter
4. In the output presets dropdown list choose: Command Line Encoder: LAME --alt-preset standard
5. Click Edit
6. Put the full path to lame.exe in the Encoder field
7. Click Ok and close the preferences dialog
8. Load the FLAC or wav files in the main window
9. Select the ones that you want to convert (may be more than one)
10. Right click the selection
11. Select Convert -> Run conversion
12. Select Command Line Encoder: LAME --alt-preset standard as file writer preset
13. Click OK and choose where you want your MP3 saved

This should do it...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v62/Terrium/nolame.jpg

This is a pic of both my foobar folder and my foobar preferences tab. I cannot find "Command Line Encoder: LAME" in my drop down menu, yet i have lame in my program files folder. I have the most up to date version of lame and foobar. :\

Then create one!!

In output presets click in add new, choose command line encoder and fill in the information missing like in this screenshot.

You have to put the full path to lame.exe in the highlighted box.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v62/Terr...commandline.jpg

Here's a picture of what pops up when I click "Add New". There is no option to do command line. I get Legacy Audio and 2 WAV. Should I downgrade to an older version or something? Do I have to "install" lame for it to see it or something? I never really installed it or anything, just drag and dropped it into syste32 folder. Thanks for the help

download this file and put it in your foobar components folder. Then restart foobar. That should do it...

it worked! THANKS! Very happy, i am.