So I finally decided to ditch AudioCatalyst after getting fed up of all the ripping errors it was producing and to switch to grip + lame under Linux.

Advantages for me are:

- Perfect rips every time
- Creates id3v2 tags which I had to create by hand before (using winamp)
- Creates m3u files which I had to create by hand before

Disadvantages are:

- No way to normalize the song AFAIK
- No way to force id3v2 tags only (even using the --id3v2-only on the command line for lame)

Anyway, it seems to me like the id3v2 tags grip passes to lame have their fields cropped to id3v1 sizes. I.E. a long song name will still be cut down even in the id3v2 field. Is this true?

-D
ps: Sorry if this has been mentionned before, I did try to do a search but didn't find anything relevant
pps: Maybe a 'MP3 encoding' or 'Music encoding' forum could be useful.

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reg. #10798 - blue 40gig MK2 #764

Anyway, it seems to me like the id3v2 tags grip passes to lame have their fields cropped to id3v1 sizes. I.E. a long song name will still be cut down even in the id3v2 field. Is this true?

What version of lame? The one I use (3.70, the latest stable version) only deals with id3v1 tags. I suggest you add tags afterwards using (a script which uses) the tools out of the latest id3lib.

Does grip use cdparanoia?

No way to normalize the song AFAIK

Not AFAIK either. Were you using AudioCatalyst under Windows? If you can put up with a Windows solution, Exact Audio Copy (www.exactaudiocopy.de) will drive the Windows version of lame, and is probably the best route to high-quality MP3s under Windows. It'll normalise, too.

sulaco.org, the home of lame, doesn't carry a Windows binary, but plenty of other sites do: http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/links.html#binaries

Peter

Just a couple corrections:

Grip only in the latest release started supporting id3v2 tags, and though I haven't noticed the cropping problem, I will attempt to do so in a moment. I run all files through my re-tagger program (which makes a pass through at automatic capitalization, including de-capitalizing preps. and not de-capitalizing phrasal verbs) after encoding.

Grip doesn't actually pass the tags to lame--it tags the files itself. Also, in reply to a further comment, grip can use cdparanoia itself, but, it uses the same code as cdparanoia does by default, even if it skips using cdparanoia. So unless you actually configure it to use cdda2wav or something, it will be using the cdparanoia code.

I would also reccommend moving to one of the beta lame encoders, they appear to be quite good.


Fly me to the moon...

I use lame beta 3.87 which does support id3v2.

I was assuming that grip would pass the tagging info on the lame command line but if what you're saying is correct that would explain a few things.

I guess I could make my songs go through another program to tag them but I'd like to make sure that the song names used are the ones from grip as it saves me fixing bad cddb entries in multiple places.

I made a post on the grip mailing list about this and if I don't get an answer or if it's not something they have planned I might hack the modification in myself to pass the tags on the lame command line and have an option to stop grip from adding tags itself.

It would also enable me something else that I want which is to output id3v2 tags only (saves space over 40gig of MP3s).

Thanks for your help,
-D


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reg. #10798 - blue 40gig MK2 #764

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

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reg. #10798 - blue 40gig MK2 #764