EAC and Lame

Software Needed

• Exact Audio Copy
• Recommended LAME version

Installation

Note: This guide assumes that EAC is has been configured for secure ripping, if not please follow this guide.

• Unzip the chosen lame version into the same directory that EAC is in.

Configuration

• Open EAC and insert a CD into the drive.
• Click the EAC menu and select Compression Options.
• Click the External Compression Tab, and put a check box in use external program for compression.
• Change Parameter Passing Scheme to User Defined Encoder.
• Change Use file extension to .mp3 if not already that.
• Click the Browse button and locate the LAME.EXE that you unzipped earlier.
• Remove the ticks from Use CRC check, Add ID3 tag and check for external programs return code.
• Do not worry what bit rate is shown in the Bit rate drop down box as this will not have any effect on the resultant MP3 file (See Note 4 at the bottom of this page).

• In the Addtional command line options box, copy and paste one of the below strings based on the Tag you would prefer.

No Tags:

-V 2 --vbr-new %s %d

ID3v1:

-V 2 --vbr-new  --id3v1-only --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d

ID3v2:

-V 2 --vbr-new --id3v2-only --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d

ID3v1 and ID3v2:

-V 2 --vbr-new --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" %s %d

APEv2: (requires wapet.exe)

• Set file extension to .mp3
• Locate wapet.exe

%d -t "Artist=%a" -t "Title=%t" -t "Album=%g" -t "Year=%y" -t "Track=%n" -t "Genre=%m" lame.exe -V 2 --vbr-new %s %d

Note 1: lame.exe needs to be in the same directory as wapet.exe.

Note 2: If you wanted to change the Lame preset, the green portion what you would substitute with the new preset.

Note 3: If you are using Lame version 3.95.1+, please note that --alt-preset is no longer used, it is now just --preset

Note 4: The %l...%l and %h...%h placeholders are used to add text according to whether the High quality or Low quality radio button is selected as shown below:

%l--alt-preset 128%l%h--alt-preset standard%h %s %d

Therefore, if you select Low quality, EAC will invoke the LAME encoder with the following command line parameters:

LAME.EXE --alt-preset 128 %s %d

..and if you select High quality EAC will invoke LAME with these command line parameters:

LAME.EXE --alt-preset standard %s %d

You can access the bitrate value in the dropdown list using the %r placeholder, For Example:

--alt-preset %r %s %d

So, if you selected 192 kBit/s in the Bit Rate drop-down list, the command line would be:

LAME.EXE --alt-preset 192 %s %d

It is a generally accepted fact that the bitrate selected in the drop-down list doesn't affect the command line. In essence this is true, as it will not affect the command line unless you use the %r placeholder. However, using ABR or CBR over VBR is not recommended and hence, you will probably never have to use the %r option.

Lame configured with ID3v1 tagging

Addtional Reading

• MP3
• LAME
• Exact Audio Copy