Hi all,

I have been using a patched version of LAME 3.93 downloaded from here:

http://www.geocities.com/nyaochi2000/lame/cuesheet/

I am aware that the ordinary LAME can be used in applications like foobar to convert ape to mp3, but apperently the ape file is first converted into wav in background before it is converted to mp3. With this patched version, APE file (with or w/o CUE) can be encoded to mp3 directly with faster speed comparing with foobar+ordinary LAME.

Unfortunetely, it seems that the author has stopped updating it and the author's email stopped receiving incoming message as well.

I'm wondering if someone here can take a look and make a patched LAME version 3.97 with CUE and APE support.

The author, nyaochi, is a member of this board.

As far as I understand it he stopped developing these patches in favour of the excellent ACDIR. ACDIR will parse an APE file with cuesheet and pipe the data to any encoder, LAME included. It also works with WAVE, Wavpack and FLAC, and with embedded cuesheets.

With regard to using foobar, I believe that you have been misinformed. Both foobar, ACDIR, and the previous LAME patches will deal with the process in exactly the same way: by decoding the ape file and piping the audio data to the encoder.

It would be quite interesting to see a speed comparison actually. I may have a go tomorrow. Right now bed is calling; kids are getting me up before 6:00 at the moment.

I completely forgot about that page. I updated it to navigate the viewers to ACDIR and foobar2000.

Thank you for the navigation, Synthetic Soul.

Synthetic Soul, thanks for the quick responce!

nyaochi, thanks for the good job! BTW, that page is the first hit on google if searched with keyword "lame cue" or "lame ape" :-)

What if I want to encode a batch of ape files without cue to mp3? With patched lame, I can use razorlame as the frontend. Will ACDIR be working with a frontend like razorlame? Thanks!

Edit: Synthetic Soul, you are right about foobar, it doesn't seem to procude wav file in the background when I did some test again this time. Don't know why I had that wrong impression. In this sense, foobar is a good frontend to me for lame.

As far as I am aware ACDIR is purely to process images with cuesheets.

I can only really suggest foobar.

If you used the adapted MAC.EXE from the shntool website you could use the command line to pipe from MAC.EXE to LAME.EXE; however foobar will transfer any tags that you have to the MP3, unlike that method.

Thinking about it you could probably use MAC.EXE to pipe to LAME.EXE and then use TAG.EXE to copy the tags from the APE file to the MP3. E.g.:


... although Tag can't write ID3v2 tags, you're restricted to ID3v1 or APEv2. APEv2 isn't really a restriction, but I'm not sure how well supported MP3 with APEv2 tags is.

foobar's easier though.