Hey all,

I'm currently ripping all my CDs to mp3 using EAC and LAME. I set eac up to make all compression tasks sleep so I can rip loads of CD's at once, then leave it to convert them over night. I want to rip them to 320kbps, but also 192kbps for my mp3 player. However, the problem is after eac converts them too 320kbps (with all the tags included in the mp3 file), I'd have to re-convert the wave files to 192kbps and tag them all myself - and considing I'd have about 1000 mp3s this could take some time!

Is there any way to convert to two different bitrates at the same time and keep thetags as well? thanks!

Yes, there's a number of programs whih should be able to do this. I currently use Wack but I believe REACT is meant to be quite good too. In Wack you set up the ini files with the parameters you want and these can be sent to the same encoder twice (i.e. Lame with insane and then again with standard presets). It works in conjuntion with Eac and can even be used to album gain your files automatically with the lame switches and wavegain values. It does take a wee bit of setting up mind. If you've got the space I'd advise a lossless codec like flac plus 192kbps for your mp3 player though.

Also, I'm not sure why you'd need to tag anything yourself. What exactly do you mean by "re-convert the wave files". Tanscoding from one lossless setting to another is a bad idea.

hey thanks for that!

what I meant was (I'm shit at explaining things) I have EAC set up not to delete the wav files when its done encoding to 320kbps. So after its finished converting the wav's to 320kbps, I would add all the wav's to something like Razorlame and convert them all to 192kbps, but then I'd have to go through all them and add tags separately

The simple solution to that would be to encode to a lossless format that supports tags or store the tags in a cue sheet when you rip each CD for your second conversion.

The better solution would the first suggestion I made

yeah i'm giving that wack a go first to see how it goes, hopefully i got the thing set up right

Good luck. I tried flacattack and maero first and never got round to finishing, but wack still takes a fair bit of setting up. Feel free to ask me if you get stuck, though I'm sure there's people who know better. There isn't a huge amount of documentation and it needs to be followed carefully. Also, I'd totally recomend the use of wavegain as part of the set up, especially for non archival mp3s if your DAP doesn't support replaygain in tags. The wack thread in this forum should be useful.

Yeah, i'm struggling with it already lol i followed what it said on the site but it won't do anything on rip a cue file and a single wave file

I'm not enirely sure what you mean. Once in EAC you need to select Action > Copy Image & Create CUE Sheet > Compressed

This of course assumes everything else is set up correctly. My command line in Eac's compression options is



The part of my ini file to deal with mp3's looks something like this:



I have wavegain.exe in the wack directory (to use the --scale %x) but other than that you've just got to make sure all the correct changes are made within EAC for it to work.

yup, there sure is... and I think this way is easier
http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=9293 <- multi encoder plugin for dBpowerAMP

if your CPU is fast enough, there isn't much sense in not encoding as you rip your CDs.. if not, then rip to a lossless format (like flac, so you can have tags), then convert them afterwards

Forgive me but I have no idea how dbpoweramp works. Can it rip securely with EAC and encode with LAME, or any other comand line encoder for that matter, in one action? If not it really isn't nearly as powerful as the setup I'm suggesting, thought I admit it's probably a lot easier to configure and faster.

dBpowerAMP can rip CDs... but only using its own ripper..(**more later)
if the cli encoder supports piping dbpoweramp can encode with it on the fly, otherwise it can use a temp wav file for input (i almost exclusively use cli encoders with dbpoweramp)

and I agree with you in that it is not as powerful as the setup you are suggesting (but i guess that depends on how you look at it)

** more...
it is obvious to me that using EAC to rip CDs is preferred... so here is yet another non-scripting way to go about it.... rip and tag to some flac files with EAC, then use dBpowerAMP to batch convert them to both bitrates at the same time (with the preserve id tags option checked) .... foobar2000 could also be used for batch conversion

point being... if you rip to a format that has tags.. it will be easier to preserve the tags when you transcode

Yup, exactly what I said earlier, though you could use a CUE sheet +wave file too if you really wanted.

If ripping with EAC is preferred, which it certainly is for me, then it makes more sense to use a program that links to EAC and allows you to perform the entire procedure in one step. This is particularly important if you're ripping the odd CD at a time rather than doing a large batch, since I wouldn't want to go through several steps on a regular basis. But yes, it's not as powerful with regard to speed etc. Does dbpoweramp support replaygaining of encoded files in this process? This is one of the most attractive features of Wack for me (which I've probably made quite apparent).