Has anyone else noticed that EAC/Lame is incredibly slow? It appears to be the external Lame encoding VBR with the alt preset. I'm ready to try something different. Any suggestions (except MusicMatch)?

Faster PC ? Better / Newer CD-Rom ?
I have an XP Athlon 1600 with a Acer 8x4x24 CD-Burner
The rip to wav goes at about 3x I know that for sure
the compression is about 10-15 seconds per song or thereabouts, if I remebemer about right- never timed it but it real quick.

I can not comment about relative speed but I use Audiograbber with LAME and get good results.

Athlon 1700 here. The rip to wave on mine is 6x. With the alt preset standard, lame is really slow. are you using the standard setting?

Two programs & many possible reasons.
EAC can be set to aggressively get as perfect a rip as possible - this can be over kill IMO when working with a good CD drive and most CDs, but it is helpfull on scratched CDs.
I have found that LAME with the --alt-preset standard does take a substantial peroid of time to encode. It appears to average at around x2 on my P3-700. But like mail2mm the results are worth it.
Personally it does not bother me as I will rip several CDs at a time and them leave the PC to encode overnight.

Suggestions:
Find out which (EAC/LAME) is the slow part.
If it's EAC check you settings, compare your rip speed with others for that drive - check www.cdspeed200.com.
Consider replacing you CD drive if it's to blame.
If LAME is taking up too much time either get a faster CPU or look at lower quality settings, or worse another "faster" encoder.
Bear in mind that you'll be listening to these MP3s for quite a time to come, so it is worth spending the time now to get the best sound you can.

It's not EAC. It is definately Lame. Initially a 1700 seemed fast enough for my purposes as all this machine does is rip and act as a mp3 server in the AV rack.

I have not ripped to wave for later encoding before. How are you doing this with Lame? WinLame?

Ripping your collection once slowly is faster than ripping it 3 times "less than perfectly" and 1 correctly...

I ripped my collection at 160kps CBR, then again with the "High Quality" setting in Music Match, then 192kps VBR (again with MusicMatch) and finally in LAME.... It has taken me over a year and I am SO glad to be almost done. EAC (and AudioGrabber) are really quick if you have a large hard drive because you can rip and rip and rip and rip until you go to bed. Then, while you sleep, let the slow encode process finish itself. I wish I would have taken the time to do it properly in the beginning.

How are you setting up Lame to encode overnight? Are you using a front end like WinLame?

How are you setting up Lame to encode overnight? Are you using a front end like WinLame?

Easy, you just feed a CD into EAC and hit the "Mp3" icon. It will rip the tracks to wav files. When it is done with the first, it will start converting it to mp3 (while it continues ripping the rest of the CD). You can set a maximum number of tracks to be encoded in the background. I had best results setting it at just 1. When the CD is done, pop in another CD and hit "mp3". It will rip that one to wav as it is still encoding the rest of the 1st CD. So, basically, you just keep popping in CDs and a queue will build up of all these compression tasks that are left to do. I let it get upto 60 or so and let it sit. One cool feature is that if you close the EAC program while there are still a number of tracks left to encode, it will resume the next time you start EAC.

As a front end for all my ripping & encoding I am using Audiograbber - so how I do it will be different to how you do it. Advantage of using Audiograbber is the ID3 tags are manitained, not sure how EAC handles this if at all...maybe SE_Sport_Driver can fill in that info.

Oh....sorry...just downloaded EAC....it seems to be a lot more userfriendly then the last time I looked at it....let me play with it for a sec.
Okay....installed EAC 0.9 beta 3, letting it select default settings...on the left are four buttons select the one that says WAV.....after you've ripped your CD to WAV either hit goto Tools->Compress WAVs (shortcut is Alt+V) and select the WAVs you want to encode or just drag and drop them in. YMMV

I was unable to get it to add the ID3 tags - but this was probably user error.
The down side to Rip now - Encode later is you need alot more hard disk space, but the pay off of converting alot more CDs to MP3 makes it worth while.

Hope this helps.

Agreed.

EAC will also preserve the ID3 tags. I've never used the WAV button, I just do the Mp3 button. But they way you are using it will work (just an extra step). In fact, you are using it just like Audiograbber works! I like AudioGrabber, but simply could NOT get it to work with Win2K. Both are excellent. EAC is better with "less than perfect" CDs, but AudioGrabber is more user friendly.

I see SE_Sport_Driver can type quicker then I can, and clearly knows EAC better then I do.
Not sure if I like the encoding in the background feature.....but it should work fine as long as the CD drive & HDD are on seperate controllers etc.

Strange, when I rip to WAV and then encode - like I use AG - I don't get ID3 tags.
But if I rip to MP3 with the encoding going on in the background (EAC->EAC options third or fourth tab to set up) I do get tags.....
I found that the encoding takes longer when ripping is occuring in the foreground, maybe as much as two or three times as long. But it did not appear to effect the ripping or anything else, and returned to a normal speed once the ripping stopped. I think this is a good option for blitz, espically as it maintains the tags.

SE_Sport_Driver - was aware of your issues with AG, I remember the nick for the AG forum. AG does require a bit of work to get running under 2K, sometimes maybe too much....

Oh I tried EVERYTHING as far as ASPI goes... didn't work. And I paid for that program!! EAC is free! Oh well.

Oh I tried EVERYTHING as far as ASPI goes... didn't work. And I paid for that program!!

I paid for AudioCatalyst (which uses the same ripping engine as Audiograbber), and I couldn't get it to work on my NT box with a certain disk drive, no matter what I did with ASPI. It only worked on my 98 box. So you're not alone. Fortunately, there are so many different options for DAE on PC's these days...

Strange. I am encoding using the external program and it rips one at a time and then encodes. It does not keep ripping until it gets through encoding. Are you using the lame dll or exe?

Any info you have on how you set it up is appreciated.

Strange. I am encoding using the external program and it rips one at a time and then encodes. It does not keep ripping until it gets through encoding. Are you using the lame dll or exe?

Any info you have on how you set it up is appreciated.

Strange, I'm hearing an echo.. hehe

The thing with EAC is that there are a million ways to set it up.. but before we start digging into the options, did you have one song highlighted before you clicked the "MP3" button? If so, it will only rip that one track.

Strange. I tried to delete the double post but it didn't delete. Selected the entire contents of the CD. Pushed the button for MP3. It will rip a track and then encode. then rip the next track then encode it and so forth until the CD is done some time later ... MUCH LATER .

I believe it might be under EAC Options Tools

Do you have "On extraction, start external compressors queued in background" checked?

Hmm...

Under compression options, I am using the lame.exe compressor.

Under EAC options, in the Tools Tab, I have "On extraction, start...." checked and set to "1". I also have "submit..." and "use cd-text..." checked and nothing else.

I don't see any other options that may be interfering..

www.chrismyden.com has great tutorials on setting up EAC

OK. Now it's working. I did not have that option checked. Nice. Thanks. That was worth the price of admission to the BBS by itself.

Fed in first CD now we'll see. I think the alt presets are much slower than the old --r3mix.

Be sure to have "secure" mode enabled too. That chrismyden.com site has tons of tutorials.. got me using ftp and IRC too!

Learn something new every day. That Chris Myden site has some really strange stuff on it.