I've used and upgraded EAC since it was just a baby (2002?) and never had any problems. When 0.99 prebeta 3 was released, I upgraded. Ripped dozens of discs and compressed them using command lines with LAME 3.97b2 in the above release. Suddenly--having not ripped any discs for maybe six weeks--I cannot get EAC to launch LAME (in its separate windows as it always has) or any other external encoder with even the simplest command lines. Very strange. The wavs are ripped, the status screen acknowleges "Copy OK/Compress Track by External Program", the bar at the bottom of EAC recognizes this fact, stating "x Compression tasks left", but that's it. It's like EAC is stuck, hanging or interrupted before it can launch the external compressor.
I hadn't changed LAME command lines in a while so I thought that might be the problem. -V 2 --vbr-new --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ignore-tag-errors --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" --tg "%m" --tc "EAC Lame3.97" %s %d seems to be a current favorite and that is what I'm trying. And nothing. I tried .flac, .mpc, .ogg. Each track I rip simply adds another digit to the number of compression tasks left.
Any ideas?