Hi all -

I'm a newbie to this stuff and I hope someone will have a positive answer. Wanting to retain all available quality I've copied hundreds of Cd's to my system using the .wav format. I currently have about 250 gig (approx 7K songs) stored and would like to begin converting to Mp3. I've downloaded the 3.97 version of LAME and the EAC (Exact Audio Copy) front end. However, if I'm correct EAC will only allow conversion from a Cd and not from a hard drive. Does anyone know how I could accomplish this conversion using the wav's on the HD as the source? I do want to use LAME as my amateur understanding indicates that it's currently the best converter available.

I am hopeful that someone will be able to tell me how to do this as it involved about a years worth of effort to get and copy all of the cd's.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you may be able to provide. If someone wishes to email me, please use this addy: funlover54@hotmail.com

Farquhardt

P.S. - I had posted this under General Audio before determining this was probably the correct forum.

There are a zillion ways to do this. Have you tried the search feature? Foobar2000, Frontah, DBPowerAmp are but a few options.

hi there farquhardt.

if you want to 'retain all available quality' but running out of size you could also encode all of your ripped music with a lossless encoder such as e.g. FLAC or WavPack.

if you want to encode to a lossy codec such as MP3 that's probably fine too as most people can't tell the difference between a medium-bitrate-MP3 and the original.
LAME is a very high quality MP3 encoder, yes. you might want to check if you have one of the 3.97 bX builds from RareWares.
as for the settings for LAME, have a look at the recommended settings and have a look around in general.
there are also some frontends listed in that sticky and some further ones are e.g. here.

if you have some time and don't want to waste space for bitrates you don't need you could also perform some tests to find the sweet spot where you can no longer perceive a difference between you original source and your lossy encode and use that setting.


also, please don't double post.

I recommend lamedrop to my friends, for its ease of use.

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME

If you did want to use EAC or just test it out, go Tools -> Compress WAV's

Both topics merged and this topic moved to MP3 General as there is nothing Tech about it.

You can use Lame as stated above by mitch, but if you let Lame create the MP3 directly from the CD, it would have the ability to pull the CD information from the internet when creating the mp3 tag data. Unless I'm mistaken, It can't do that from the Wav files you've created so all those mp3's would basically have empty tags.

I would rather go the FLAC or WavPack route. The lossless encoders would cut your current hard disk use in half. So, is like you have a 500GB HD.