Hi

I'm a bit of a newbie with Lame. I've used 3.97b1 with Audiograbber, but wanted to use presets and secure ripping so switched to EAC.

I was using --preset medium fast to make smaller files for my tiny 128MB MP3 player, and I thought it was fine, but then I noticed certain other EAC options I played with were messing up the preset.

Other than --preset medium fast, I didn't know what settings to use in EAC, so I downloaded the Lame.exe mod from Rarewares to force --preset medium fast. Now when I run EAC I get a crash with Lame.exe every time. If I rip a track Lame pops up really quickly but does nothing, so all I have is the intermediate .wav.

I tried the Lame.exe mod with RazorLame and manually at the command prompt, but got the same crash.

Obviously I'm doing something wrong with the Lame.exe mod. Will the Lame.exe mod work with EAC? If so what am I doing wrong?

Any help would be great!

Adz

shouldn't it be

Maybe this will help ?

Thanks for the reply!

I've tried it that way round, and other EAC options still seem to interfere. Thanks for the post link - I had already read it while searching but good to know I'm on the right lines...

I thought the point of the Lame.exe mod was to force a preset based on the .ini file, but for some reason EAC just doesn't like the modded .exe. I swapped it back to the normal .exe and got no crash, but of course the EAC command line parameters then continued to override the preset.

So far I've tested and found the bitrate dropdown box and channel settings are definitely overriding the preset when using the standard .exe and --preset medium fast.

I'm happy not to use the modded .exe, as long as I can get EAC to output the perfectly-tuned presets, without stupid extra parameters!

Thanks again
Adz

Edit: I think you're right - it should be that way round. Not quite sure why the .ini file calls it --preset medium fast. Perhaps that's why the modded .exe doesn't work?

Edit 2: Done some tests and I can get it to accept --preset fast medium, ignoring the dropdown bitrate parameter, but I'm getting variable QVAL (2 or 7) - what does this switch mean and do?

Define it as an External Compressor and then simply place '%s %d' in the parameter placeholder. It works here just fine.

Thanks. I already had it as external/user defined compressor, but was missing the %s %d.

However the modded .exe still causes a Lame.exe crash every time I start EAC as below:



However, EAC still starts after this. These are the settings I have:



When it starts the external modded Lame.exe it seems to hang for a while, but with the %s %d command line it does start after maybe 10 seconds. I then get the below:



All the settings are the same as when I was using the normal Lame.exe, except for the QVAL switch, which is now 3. What does this switch mean and do?

Thanks again for the help!
Adz

The first thing to try is to use the standard lame compile.

Put into the "Additional command line options" box.

Thanks! In my second post I had tried the standard Lame compile which solved the crash (only happens with the modded Lame.exe), but I hadn't tried the standard Lame compile with --preset fast medium %s %d.

I just tried it and it gives the same settings (including QVAL=3) as the modded compile, but with no crashes! I guess this means my settings problem is solved thanks!

Is the %s %d something to do with the QVAL switch?

However I would be interested to know why the mod causes EAC to crash...?

Thanks again
Adz

%s = so EAC will know what the source/input file is.
%d = so EAC will know what the destination/output file is.

%s %d tells EAC where it should put the source and the destination file in the command line.

The lame documentation says this about qvals:
In theory lower values provide better quality. When the presets where created, it was shown that lower values than q2 did not improve quality and only slowed encoding. In fact, q0 was buggy (which apparently has been fixed). A new experimental mode was added some time ago and what was previously q2 is now q3.

Nothing to worry about. The settings were all chosen with good reason. There are no indications that quality will improve with a lower qval (it could even be degraded).

Thanks!

%s %d is obvious now - I must be stupid! I'm surprised nobody said RTFM...

I guess QVAL is now defaulting to 3 because I'm now using Lame in EAC as a 'User Defined Encoder', rather than 'Lame Encoder'.

Back when I was using 'Lame Encoder', the 'High Quality' radio button must have been passing QVAL=2 as a parameter...

I'm happy I've got things right now, but the Lame.exe mod crash is still a mystery to me...

Adz