From FLAC to MP3 and back again–EAC Rips with LAME

Maximum PC has a great post on Ripping archival quality MP3s from audio CDs, but one of the user comments following the article simplifies the LAME options.

User vintagegold suggests using the following:

-V0 %s %d

I just tried the above settings within LAME to rip a classical CD – Borodin – and it sounds great on my AKG K 271 Studio headphones.  The HydrogenAudio wiki does indicate one preset with even higher quality for archiving, but my ears(which are still sensitive enough to hear the frequency on certain monitors/LCDs) don’t find the higher constant 320 kbit bitrate necessary.

Some of my essential EAC Screenshots – refer to the Maximum PC article for setting up Accurate Rip and other portions of EAC:

Arturo "Buanzo" Busleiman has current Windows and Mac downloads of the LAME binaries [high quality MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) encoder] on his Argentina-hosted site.  The Audacity for Windows download worked on windows 7 x64.

Goodbye FLAC – I’ll not miss your options.
-8 -A tukey(0.25) -A gauss(0.1875) -b 4096 -V -T "artist=%a" -T "title=%t" -T "album=%g" -T "date=%y" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "genre=%m" %s --sector-align

Royalty Free Music

Looking for some music to include in a multimedia project, or maybe on a telephone system? These tracks are high quality and royalty-free. The author requires Attribution under a Creative Commons license, and accepts donations.

I enjoyed the African and Celtic tracks - here's one example.