The following entry is based on my personal opinion and not necessarily representing the view on the entire public.

I always thought ripping music with LAME was a breeze; that wasn’t exactly the case.  It took me a couple hours to achieve what I wanted.  After my SHURE SE310 headphones (which, by the way, you can see here: http://flickr.com/photos/kwan-family/sets/72157609132387652/ ) arrived on Friday, I went to my friend’s house and borrowed some CD’s.  So I downloaded LAME v3.97b2 because I looked at online sources that it was the stable and very good.  So, I went onto download EAC because it seemed to be widely used with LAME.  After some research, I found an instructions set on hydrogenaudio:

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

Here are the instructions in brief:

1. After the CD is in the drive, open Compress options under EAC Menu
2. Click the External Compression Tab, and put a check box in Use external program for compression.
3. Change Parameter passing scheme to User Defined Encoder (see this thread for reasoning).
4. Change Use file extension to .mp3.
5. Click the Browse button and locate the lame.exe that you unzipped into the EAC directory earlier.

However, after I downloaded v3.97b2, unzipped it into the EAC file, went to Compression option, and browsed for the lame.exe file…. guess what, it wasn’t there!

The horror….  I did more research and found that the lame.exe is NOT in every version available.  However, I also found that the latest version: 3.98.2 had it and so I downloaded the file from here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=290&package_id=309

I got rid of the old LAME and unzipped the new LAME into the EAC folder.  I located the file and put it in there.

But that’s not all… the code on hydrogenaudio did not give me what I wanted.  I wanted V0 inside of V2; so, I researched some more and found this line of code:  -V 0 –id3v2-only –pad-id3v2 –ta “%a” –tt “%t” –tl “%g” –ty “%y” –tn “%n” %s %d which is what I wanted: V0 and ID3 v2.  So I put this in the “Additional command-line options” where it belongs.

For more important on what these are, feel free to visit http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lame and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3 .

But trust me, these results are pretty much as good as you can get with mp3 files.  If you don’t believe me, you can read here: http://www.soundexpert.info/coders320.jsp

After that, just fill in the reminder settings (default should be fine) and press OK.  Note that Bit rate drop down menu actually has no effect when you actually rip the music because the additional command-line options take priority.   

And a screenshot to double check if you have everything.

Open up your disk, high MP3 on the right hand menu bar, and watch you computer do the magic.

You nature responses might be: “why not use aac with Winamp, that has a much better rating” and “what about loseless” and “V2 is good enough, isn’t it?”

My answers are: aac is not compatible with everything, including Windows Media Player which many people uses.  I also prefer LAME over Winamp due to simplicity and the “cool factor” (not that there is much).  Loseless is definiately a great alternative if your portable music player supports it and if you have ample space on your hard drive and music player.  I have a 1TB external hard drive, 250 GB hard drive, 8 GB phone, therefore, V0 sometimes is referred as “overkill”, but why not? it’s available anyways.

Hope this helps!