Hi,

I have searched for ages, but cant come to a conclusion so I thought I would ask the experts.

1. In EAC if extracting to waveform, which wave format is best to use?

2. Which wave format is used when using an external compressor? I presume that EAC converts to wav then to mp3 etc rather than straight to mp3.

3. If I set EAC to compress a wav file to Lame -V 2 --vbr-new, why does it produce a file different from when I compress the same wav file using Lame -V 2 --vbr-new in the command line?

PS when viewing the dos "graph" that is produced when compressing using Lame the two are very different, it is as if EAC is chopping off part of the wav. I can provide screenshots if needed

Thanks

1. Windows PCM audio
2. Windows PCM audio
3. Maybe ID3 tags. We'd need screenshots to tell you, but the graph doesn't mean much... you need to bit-compare the once-decompressed mp3s.

OK so i extracted a track using PCM. I then converted it to Lame mp3 using both EAC and command Line with the switch "-V 2 --vbr-new" in both cases

here are the screenies

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gargent/charl...differences.JPG

The resulting file from the command line is 333kbs and it is 325kbs from the EAC extraction.

oh and what does qval mean and why is it different when using command line

here is the output from a bitcompare from foobar

INFO (CORE) : startup time: 1500 ms
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : Comparing:
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : location: "file://C:\Documents and Settings\Charles\Desktop\03 - Orange Wedge.mp3" (0)
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : location: "file://C:\Documents and Settings\Charles\Desktop\04 - Orange Wedge.mp3" (0)
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : first different sample found
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : differences found: 1038036 sample(s), starting at 0.3711565 second(s), peak: 0.203353 at 20.38714 second(s), 1ch
INFO (foo_bitcompare) : Finished successfully.

Thanks

Somehow EAC seems to pass q=2 to the encoder. How did you set up Lame in EAC? As a "user defined encoder"? Maybe you can make a screenshot of this page in EAC, as this seems to be the cause of the difference.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gargent/charles/pics/eac.JPG

I dont the V 2 in "Lame -V 2 --vbr-new" is the same as the qval in the encoding box...

Its a bit annoying, what you write in the box should be passed to the encoder without any additions.

For now i am going to use the command line as I know that it does what i tell it to do... (or does it :/)

Change "Parameter Passing Scheme" to "User Defined Encoder", instead of "LAME MP3 Encoder". If you don't, then the option "High Quality" will send a "-h" command to Lame which is the same as "-q2". Also remember to add %s %d to the end of your command line.

-Martin.