Hi, I'm a newbie and this forum is probably way over my head but I am hoping someone will take pity on me and help me understand if I have this right...

I downloaded the latest EAC, I had an old one that someone helped me set up years ago and I decided to upgrade. One issue I had was that it was always giving me mp3 files that had no track names or anything, I'd just get "track 1, track 2" etc.

So I downloaded the latest EAC and set it up the way I had it but looked for info on how to solve my track naming problem.

Found the page from hydrogenaudio about EAC and it gave me the following string to use on my extraction page, using LAME:
-V 2 --vbr-new --id3v2-only --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tg "%m" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d

It seems to work fine except that it put a "-" in front of the artist name for some reason?

BUT this is what I am hoping you can help me with:
What does this string I entered do, exactly? I understand the basics but I'm not clear on how it is telling the encoder to compress wavs to mp3's. I see the --vbr-- and know it is giving me variable bit rate, but is it giving me the highest variable bit rate I can get?

What I was thinking I wanted was vbr at 320kbps, which is what I have selected in the drop down menu in EAC, but what I seem to be getting is closer to 256kbps. Is that just because this string is telling EAC or LAME to compress at some sort of "automatically" calculated bit rate or ?

Is this the right string for me if I want the best quality mp3's, or should I just go with straight across 320kbps? How much space does vbr actually save - in general (I know it varies). To my way of thinking if there isn't a big difference in space, I may as well go straight across to 320kbps.

If I DO decide to go just straight across the board 320kbps, how do I change my settings with EAC to do that? Just get rid of the string and choose 320kbps in the drop down menu? Which part of the string would I lose (I know some of it has to do with naming my files).

Thanks for answering this, I'm not knowledgeable re reading strings and just want to set my EAC and let 'er rip.

You need to tell EAC to lookup this information before ripping.

Do you mean in the tag? This has no bearing on the filename. That's handled in EAC Options under the tab that says filename. If it's in the tag then you need to see how the artist information is entered in EAC's main window.

Tells EAC to use the third-highest VBR quality setting (-V2) using the new VBR mode (--vbr-new). --id3v2-only and --pad-id3v2 tells Lame to write only ID3v2 tags and to pad these tags so that later changes/additions may not require a complete re-write of the file. --ta ... --tn tells Lame to pass along information from EAC (%a ... %n) to these tags. %s and %d are placeholders for filenames.

Without adding additional parameters, the highest VBR bitrate would be -V0.

As stated in the wiki article, the bitrate chosen in the drop-down box is ignored, unless you didn't follow the instructions carefully enough.

-b 320 --id3v2-only --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tg "%m" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d

Thanks muchisimo for the reply and especially the string. I thought I was pretty computer savvy, making web sites and all, but this scripting language is something I just don't quite get! (at least not yet; and I really don't have time to delve into it at this point...)

So it's all still more or less mumbo jumbo to me at this point (though your explanation helps quite a bit), which makes me really glad that you gave me the info to alter the string without my having to study for days to figure it out! Thanks again!

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