Sorry for the interesting title, but I didn't know what else to call it. I am archiving all my cds at the moment using EAC. What I am trying to do is cutdown on the time required to convert them to both FLAC and MP3 at the same time (FLAC for archiving and MP3 for my MP3 player). Since most of the time is actually spent ripping the uncompressed mp3, what I would like to do is just rip the CD into wav using the "test and copy" option. Then as usual use the FLAC frontend to convert to FLAC. THen use LAME to convert to mp3. However, the way LAME is setup it is really hard to convert if it is not piggybacked onto another program like EAC.

What I am wondering is, is there a way to convert WAV to MP3's in EAC after they are already ripped, or is there another program allows full "user command line" control of LAME that can do this?

I think I just figured it out myself using foobar. If anyone has a better option, let me know as I am always open to suggestions.

EAC rips CDs.

what you want is to rip to flac and later batch encode to mp3

foobar will do that
so will sweep+flac+lame
and speek's frontend
etc

Thanks, I will take a look at those other programs.

I have been using the AudioFormatConversion python script with great success. If you get Python and all the pieces assembled it has run in Windows, but I have only used it in Fedora and Mandriva Linux. Once you have the program material ripped, it can convert/encode between many formats.

Supported input formats:
wma
flac
wav
ogg
mp3
rpm RealAudio streams
rm/ra RealAudio files

Supported output formats:
wav
flac
mp3
ogg

It's just a front end for mplayer(for .WMA)/normalize/FLAC/vorbis-tools/Lame, but it handles funny characters well, gives complete command line/switch access to Lame/oggenc/FLAC, and will recurse through directories unattended. It lets you specify a different directory for output, and a different location for a tempfile, improving throughput on multidisk systems. It handles wildcards well.

The programmer is very accessible, the last four updates to the script have been suggestions/questions/problems I have posed to him. The code is well-commented and only really needs one line un/commented, to handle the different mplayer version tempfile formats for .WMA input. It is well worth trying, it can save a lot of manual juggling. It's also an easy way to peel off some lossy versions for the hardware player.

It also preserves tag information across formats as much as possible.
edit: i can't spel.

Alternatively use an application like MAREO, WACK or REACT as the external compressor in EAC to encode to MP3 and FLAC in the same run.

Using foobar is equally as easy though, it just depends whether you want one long step (EAC with MAREO/REACT/WACK), or two smaller steps (EAC then foobar).

Edit: Added links

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....5&st=0&p=359842 migth give you some ideas