I'm using --alt-preset extreme,

if 320 kbit/s is selected in the EAC dropdown menu it seems to override the --alt-preset extreme parameter; if anything lower is selected (256-96 kbit/s) EAC will launch LAME with the correct preset parameter.

If I choose only to extract the CD track and encode it with LAME later using the same --alt-preset extreme, the resulting file will be slightly smaller.


Shouldn't --alt-preset override any of the EAC native settings for LAME?

Does EAC add aguments to --alt-preset ...

How much smaller? If trivial, maybe the ripper is adding more tag information than you get from a simple
encode command.

Files were just a little bit bigger using EAC to rip and launch the encoder but the cause was actually that I had EAC set to add CRC checksum to the files..

I did a quick search in the forums and found that other users also reported different encoded file sizes using EAC and just LAME alone. It seems that EAC has a bug.. if 320 kbit/s is selected in the drop down menu, this will override any additional command line, so when using an additional command line always make sure you have another bitrate selected in EAC native setting.