EAC woes (1 Viewer)

[Daren Welsh]

I'm listening to a set of WAV's right now and they seem just fine. I've got two HD's, each on their own ATA-100 bus and two CD drives, each on their own IDE bus.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Are you running something odd that might conflict with lame? Try shutting down as many of your running programs as possible, including stuff that sits in the taskbars lower right hand corner.

 

[Daren Welsh]

Well, I can't friggin believe it, but I think the problem with LAME was that I was overclocking. I pulled back my fsb to the default 133 MHz and everything seems to be working fine now. *shrug* Don't ask me how changing the bus speed can so drastically affect a program that should be able to work on so many different hardware configurations.

Now that I've actually got it working (knock on wood), I have a question about the EAC implemenation of LAME. Under EAC compression options, there's a spot to put in additional command line options. The default is "%l--alt-preset 128%l%h--alt-preset standard%h %s %d" (minus the quotes). Can someone spell out what each of these parameters does? When I try to just delete the entire line, LAME spouts a syntax error. I guess I could just rip WAV's with EAC and then manually use RazorLame later, but I figure I might as well automate it all using EAC now. So how would I set the additional command line options to do the highest quality VBR MP3 possible? Also, what's the difference between stereo and J-stereo?

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Well, lame is very computation intensive obviously. I'm betting that if you were to run something like seti@home to run the CPU at 100% continuously you'd start seeing problems as well.
You were pushing your system beyond its rated specs, so no wonder things started happening that shouldn't.
My personal opinion about overclocking is that I'll take stability over a few extra percent performance any day of the week. Of course, that's just me.
Tons of good info about MP3 encoding etc at http://www.r3mix.net !

 

[Daren Welsh]

Actually, I had RC5 running for a month or two and I never had problems with it (while overclocking 133->147 FSB). I even set it up to use both of my CPUs. If you're not familiar with RC5, it basically uses spare CPU cycles to run its algorithm. So my CPUs were both churning at 100% 24/7 and I'd be stable.

 

[Max Leung]

Darren, Lame is and EAC running simultaneously is very disk intensive too. Heck, running Lame alone will also use the hard drive. On an overclocked system, you're running an app that makes use of an overclocked IDE bus, overclocked CPU, AND an overclocked FSB. RC5 or Seti@home hardly use the IDE bus at all, and hence you didn't detect the problem. When both are working hard, then you start seeing problems!
Timing problems pushing data onto and from the IDE bus while retrieving and compressing data, which corrupts the data pulled from the .WAV file. You are very lucky you didn't corrupt your hard drive!
Scared? Not nearly enough.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Yup, that is one of the biggest "scares" of overclocking the PCI bus too - possible hard drive problems due to the bus running faster than spec. Well, that and potential instability especially under high load. Like I said, IMHO, overclocking is pointless these days, unless one enjoys trading away stability and getting an undetectably faster machine.
Of course, really nutty overclocking projects can be fun just for the sake of doing it; we're talking stuff like water cooling or refrigeration etc, that can be kind of fun.

 

[Daren Welsh]

How do I use EAC/LAME to rip/encode a CD that has a bunch of songs mixed into one mp3?

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

You want to extract the entire CD as one big file?

Hmm, never tried doing that, not sure if you can.

Well, you can always rip the tracks and stitch them together with third party software and then encode the resulting single wave file with Lame, but that's a bit work intensive.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Click on Action then Copy Image & Create CUE Sheet.
The CD will be extracted as one big .wav file.
There's also Copy Range which allows you to define the start and end points.

 

[Daren Welsh]

What's the CUE sheet?

 

[Rob Gillespie]

It's a text file detailing the track break points and gap lengths. EAC can use it to burn a .wav file to CD-R as a proper CD rather than just as one file. It's inconsequential to what you're trying to do.

 

[Daren Welsh]

One last question (I hope): If I selected "compressed" from the menu selection you told me to try, it says it uses an external compressor (.mp3) ... so does that mean it'll use LAME with the settings I've been using for my standard CDs?

 

[Rob Gillespie]

I've not tried it Daren.
You can find a really good tutorial on EAC HERE

 

[Daren Welsh]

Well I just tried it and it worked great. By selecting "compressed" it automatically used LAME with my settings to encode the temp .wav file. I just listened to the first 10 minutes of the mp3 and it seems to be perfect
Thx for the help.