If anybody is interested, I've bit the bullet and looked into the source code for grip.

grip does in fact add id3v1 tags itself rather than pass the info onto lame.

So I though that turning OFF id3 tags in grip and passing this kind of command line to lame would work:

--id3v2-only --tc "My Comment" --tt "%n" --ta "%a" --tl "%d" --ty %y --tg "%G" --tn %t -mj -v --vbr-new -V1 -b128 -c %f %o
(Note that %y is not in the man pages but IS supported to provide the year)

Unfortunately I tracked down a little problem which cause this to fail under grip 2.95. The number of parameters is hard-coded to 19 inside the code. I fixed this and made the routine dynamically allocate any number of parameters.

This now allows for id3v2 tags and no song name cropping.

If anyone would like to take advantage of this fix, I will pass the patch to the author of grip and hopefully he'll get it in the next version.

While I was in there, I've also added support for normalize to my local version. I've go it set up so that normalize can use just one multiplier for all selected tracks which means if only one track is quiet on the album it won't get normalized to a loud track like other solutions would if you normalize track by track.

This second patch should take me a little bit longer to clean up as I don't know much about GTK and I haven't made any GUI interface to the normalize phase yet (it's all hardcoded to my settings :o). Again if someone is interested in this modification, let me know.

I now have a setup which rips EXACTLY to my requirements with no manual steps whatsoever. I like it!

-D

---
reg. #10798 - blue 40gig MK2 #764