After procrastinating and dragging my feet for a couple of years now, I have finally decided to re-rip/encode/tag all my music. The primary force behind this decision was that I did such a poor job of tagging the first time around that getting it all right just wasn't practical. So, it was a good excuse to try this EAC/Lame business everybody talks about.

It was (for me, at least -- an old dog who doesn't learn new tricks all that readily) a pretty steep learning curve. I spent about six hours just studying and working my way through all the parameterization options and trying to decipher the tantalizingly vague information that came with the program itself before I even tried ripping a CD. In the process of my experimentation I learned something that most people, even Windows gurus (which I assuredly am not!) don't know.

Everybody knows that 32-bit windows allows filenames up to 255 characters. But what a lot of folks don't know is that the 255 character limit includes the complete directory path from root.

This means that if the directory path to your file is, for example, "C:\Documents and Settings\Tanstaafl1\DeskTop\_MP3 Remasters\Classical\Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich\" you only have 159 characters left for the actual filename. Believe it or not, I actually ran into this limitation, because classical music filenames can be quite complex. (I use the filenames with MP3TS to generate my tags). When you have filenames like "Tchaikovsky-Symphony #6 in B Minor, Opus 29, 'Pathetique', Second Movement (Andante Cantabile)" combined with a convoluted directory path... well, you get the idea.

All in all, I am loving EAC. I have been telling people that EAC is to AudioGrabber as Microsoft Word is to Notepad.

Now, after you've waded through all this prologue drivel... here is my question.

Is there a way within EAC to delay the Lame encoding? That is, can I rip a bunch of CDs, and when I am done ripping, have EAC tell Lame to start the encoding, and just let it run overnight?

The reason I want to do this is that the ripper is considerably faster than the encoder, and on my system at least there is an annoying glitch that causes EAC to lock up temporarily, usually about once during every rip, until Lame finishes one of its encodes. (I run four encode threads simulataneously).

I think I am getting pretty good speed out of EAC -- I am averaging about 12x speed. This is on a 2.5GHz Athlon with a gigabyte of striped RAM on a 400 MHz bus, a pair of 7200 RPM 120 GB hard drives, a 128 MB video card, Lite-On 80x CD-RW drive, with sound and ethernet on the motherboard. But, all that EAC speed drops to zero whenever Lame locks it up. The lockups last anywhere from one to three minutes, and always end when whichever Lame encode session that is causing the problem finishes. Then EAC just picks right up where it left off.

I don't hesitate to recommend EAC/Lame to anybody who has been putting it off. Just be sure to spend the time to really learn all it can do to take full advantage of its capabilities.

tanstaafl.