Hi. I'm trying to downsize some of my 320 cbr mp3's for my portable. I have been trying to use foobar and lame 3.98a3 using these steps - http://www.misticriver.net/showthread.php?t=30300
but I keep getting the following error:

INFO (foo_clienc) : Source file: file://C:\Documents and Settings\Jason\My Documents\0X_Solarstone_Eastern_Sea_(Underwater_Remix)_320.mp3
INFO (foo_clienc) : 44100Hz 24bps 2ch
INFO (CORE) : Clipping detected.
ERROR (foo_clienc) : Encoding failed

I tried messing around with the command line encoder settings but it didn't make any difference. Any help would be appreciated.

"Encoding failed" suggests that the command line is wrong.

Can you post the contents of your "Parameters" text box please?

Hint: -V5 is different to -v5. -v2 --vbr-new - %d will result in an encoder failure.

Edit: Also, can you post the whole console output please. The output should contain information about the destination file as well (the line before "INFO (foo_clienc) : Source file:..."). Maybe post the tag values for ARTIST and ALBUM in the source also.

Thanks for the prompt reply. I tried changing back to lame 3.97b2 and messing with the command line parameters with the same results. Then I changed the command line parameter to
-V5 --vbr-new - %d
and it worked fine.
Originally I believe it was v5 --vbr-new %d.
I guess I need to read up a bit more on the command line syntax as I don't fully understand why it wasn't working before, but I'm happy it is at least functioning now. Dropped my 17mb tune down to 7mb and still sounds good

Here's the full text from the console before though if you can make anything of it.
INFO (foo_clienc) : CLI encoder: C:\Program Files\Lame\lame.exe
INFO (foo_clienc) : Destination file: file://C:\test\solarstone___0X_Solarstone_Eastern_Sea_(Underwater_Remix)_320.mp3
INFO (foo_clienc) : Source file: file://C:\test\0X_Solarstone_Eastern_Sea_(Underwater_Remix)_320.mp3
INFO (foo_clienc) : 44100Hz 24bps 2ch
ERROR (foo_clienc) : Writing to encoder failed
ERROR (foo_clienc) : Encoding failed
ERROR (foo_diskwriter) : Conversion failed.

I suspect that the above is not exactly right, and that there is some lackadaisical spelling there; but assuming it is, your original string would fall down in two places.

v5 --vbr-new %d

v5 should be -V5 - note the hyphen and the capital "V".

You need the hyphen before %d to tell LAME that the input is coming from STDIN. Using this method foobar pipes the audio data to LAME. An alternative is:

-V5 --vbr-new %s %d

The %s tells foobar to create a temporary WAV file, and to pass that to LAME, rather than pipe the audio data using STDIN.

Hopefully this info may help you in the future somehow.

That helps alot. Thank you for the info.