I want to rip a number of cd,s with cdex 1.51, I have the latest lame installed 3.98. In the past I used lame in cdex as an external encoder rather than using the internal option as I found it gave a more accurate result by using a predefined string. However I cant remember how to set up the string and having trawled the net am am still non the wiser. I am intending to rip the cd,s to vbr something to the old preset standard or preset medium. I have read somewhere that lame 3.98 can do floating points now, what on earth is that, thats confused me even further.

Thank You

The following seems to work, creating LAME 3.98 VBR -V2 MP3s by way of the --preset fast standard





Replace the External Encoder path to point to where your lame.exe is actually located.


Also, whatever value you put in for the bitrate doesn't matter since that value isn't getting passed as part of the parameter string (it is value %3 which isn't used in my example).

Thanks Wonderslug, can you supply a list of any other strings that I could use aswell. I could then copy and paste to note document for future reference.

Many Thanks for your help.

Moderation: No need to quote previous post in its entirety. We can already see it without any trouble.

Well, so far, CDex uses the following strings to pass onto the external encoder:

%1 is the source filename

%2 is the destination filename

%3 is the bitrate desired


You really don't need to use %3 unless you want to encode using CBR or ABR and wish to specify the bitrate within CDex as in the External Encoder settings tab I showed above. For VBR, leave it out.


For LAME 3.98, the following HA Wiki gives you a list of all the command line parameters it accepts:


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