Hey

Could some please help ive encoded alot of my cds into mp3 with recommendations from this site. My problem is that when i view some of the mp3s in either Mr question man or dbpoweramp windows shell extension it cant seem to find the lame tag. LameTag.exe says that no Lame Tag is present. In dbpoweramp it says fhg (Guess) and in mr question man it doesnt display it corectly under "Encoder Info" it just says LAME 3.97 while the the rest of the files ive encoded report LAME 3.97b V2: Preset Standard (fast mode) like they should. Could someone please put my mind to rest ive tried everything to even find out what the damn problem is. I have searched around to find the answer but could not find one. I've tried vbrfix and foobar "Fix MP3 Header" but problem is still there. I just hope that not all my mp3s will have this same problem as this did not happen straight away but only recently and i have not installed any software or even touched the mp3s after they were ripped.

Thanks for any views any one may have.

Can anybody help?

So, you did use EAC+Lame?

If you really used the recommended options, you've encoded with lame.exe, not with the DLL. The DLL often doesn't make Lametags. EAC has the option "write Xing header" in the compression otpions/LameDLL. It has to enabled so Lametag can be written and shown in MrQuestion Man for example.

Or you use lame.exe with the "don't write Lame tags" parameter, but I don't think so.

You can't fix a Lametag. It's only written in the encoding process.

I have used the dll on some of the tracks ripped with cdex a while ago and that could be the problem there, but a few im positive that i used lame.exe and eac. By accident a while back i was checking my eac config and found that i had "add ID3 tag" checked and
(-V 2 --vbr-new --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tg "%m" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d) inserted into the command line options box could this be the source of my problems.

the Lame header has space for 9 characters, so LAME3.97b i believe would be the current string. It also has room to store a value corresponding with a VBR preset, so --preset standard is detected that way.

Without the Lame header (an extension of the Xing header, btw), an application would probably read the padding at the end of the file. I think with 3.97 versions, it just keeps repeating the text "Lame 3.97" over and over.

I am not 100% certain any of the above is correct... this is just off the top of my head.

Chances are you had a typo in there and let -t slip in into the command line. And that disables LAME tag writing.

Just another reason to put an end to the FUD and let EAC do the tagging.