Lameb - Lame Batch encoder

Let your PC do the hard work, encoding multiple CDs with id3 tags

Lameb is a program that encodes wav files to well named mp3s with automatic id3v1.x and id3v2 tagging. It can put the mp3s into directories for artist, album, etc. After you've ripped the tracks from CD with EAC all you have to do is click on Lameb once and let it do everything for you.

I wrote it because I didn't like the time consuming and error prone two stage process of encoding wav files. First with RazorLAME and then using an id3 tagger to set the id3 tags. Lameb does both stages at the same time. It depends on EAC for the ripping of the wav files and Lame to do the mp3 encoding.

With Lameb you can rip 50 CDs and then leave it to encode them all overnight. It's the only piece of software I've seen that allows this.

• Completely configurable mp3 and playlist filename formats.
• id3v1.x tags: Artist, Album, Title and Track No are all placed into the id3v1.1 tag.
• id3v2 tags. If one of the above fields is longer than the 30 chars that an id3v1 tag can store, then an id3v2 tag is also added to hold the full information.
• Year and genre are also automatically propogated from EAC into both of the id3 tags.
• A useful id3 comment is created which contains the Lame version and encoding options. This enables you or anyone to easily see how each mp3 was encoded and the initials or the encoder.
  e.g. User pb used the www.hydrogenaudio.org recommended lame compile and the recommended --alt-preset standard settings:

   LAMEB3.902 alt-preset standard pb 

• WinAMP playlists creation with filenames that sort correctly just after the album tracks (unlike EAC which only uses the album name as the playlist filename). Multiple playlists for each album can be automatically made.

• Automatic detection of Various Artists albums. Different naming conventions are used for them so that they sort properly alphabetically:

  By default this is how a standard album looks:

  Vangelis - Earth (01) Come On.mp3
  Vangelis - Earth (02) We Were All Uprooted.mp3
  ...
  Vangelis - Earth.m3u
  

  This is the default filename format for VA albums:

  Soul Survivors 2 (01) Tainted Love - Gloria Jones.mp3
  Soul Survivors 2 (02) 25 Miles - Edwin Starr.mp3
  ...
  Soul Survivors 2.m3u
  

  If you don't like those filename formats you can change them to whatever format you prefer.

  You can see that these will sort alphabetically together, with the playlist coming just after the album. Track titles form a column to the right of the track number (nn), so your eye can easily locate them. I find it's generally the track name you are looking for on a VA disc, rather than the artist.

• All this can be achieved by a single mouse click.

So you have the best of both worlds. Well formed id3 tags if you are using an MP3 database program to manage your music collection. Or well formed filenames if you are just browsing your collection with something like Windows Explorer.

As of Lameb v3.0 you can specify your own filename formats. These are completely configurable with EAC style metachars. Directories too are automatically made. e.g. the following format is easy to achieve

C:\Mp3\Stevie Wonder\Hotter Than July\Hotter Than July [03] Rocket Love.mp3

VA and non-VA albums can be given completely different filename formats.

C:\Mp3\Various Artists\New Orleans Funk\The Meters - Just Kissed My Baby.mp3

The latest version of Lameb is available here:

You need to extract this zip file to C:\LAMEB and then follow the instructions in the readme.txt. Email me if you have problems.

Writing long filenames to CD

Using Lameb's default filename format can lead to long filenames. These can be a problem to get onto a CD that Windows will read. The Microsoft Joliet CD format supports up to 128byte filenames and in addition 16bit unicode chars. Thus, you can either have 64 x 16bit chars or 128 x 8bit chars. This latter 128char variant is usually refered to as Romeo and the 64char version as Joliet. Windows supports both, as they are really just variants of the one format, Joliet. For some reason there are relatively few programs that support writing in Romeo. One that does is NTI CD-Maker 2000 Pro.

Split_wav enables the spliting of the CUE+WAV combinations created by EAC & CDRWIN. Albums are split into individual wav files which are correctly named for Lameb to encode.

Newest version allows direct splitting from wav files loss-lessly compressed with Shorten, Flac or Monkey's Audio. This allows you store up to about three audio CDs onto one data CD. In addition to using less CDRs this has several advantages over simply copying the audio CD onto another audio CD:

• The data CD format (CDROM) has much better error correction than the audio CD format. Thus you are more likely to be able to extract files from them in the future. Physical deterioration of the CD will cause errors in an audio CD whilst a data CD will still read perfectly.
• Error detection is provided by the compression formats, which wav does not have. Thus at least you will know if the data goes bad which you won't with an audio CD or wav files on CDROM.
• Finally you remove the need for the error prone audio extraction stage. EAC exists, because audio extraction is such a difficult and time consuming job to get right. Once you've spent all that time to get the audio into data format why would you ever want to transfer it back? Keep the audio in data format for the rest of it's life. NB Unless of course you want to use one of those old audio CD players :)

Once you've archived all your CDs away don't worry, these files are easy to extract from this format in the new split_wav. You can now associate .CUE files with split_wav, in Explorer. This means you can simply pop in a CDROM containing several CUE and compressed wav files and simply click once on the relevant CUE file to get them extracted. Another click to start Lameb and you have them encoded as mp3s with id3 tags.

The Year and Genre of an album aren't written into the .cue file by EAC. However, you can put these into the cue files yourself with these special REM lines:

REM YEAR 1958
REM GENRE "Jazz"
PERFORMER "Miles Davis"
TITLE "Kind Of Blue"

Split-wav automatically detects and uses these comments, saving you having to manually supply the year and genre every time you use it. This means you won't have to dig around for the year of release sometime in the future when you may not have access to the CD. NB REM lines in cue files are officially for comments so they won't interfere with any other software which uses CUE files. If you think it would be useful to have an option within EAC to automatically write these REM lines then let it be known on the EAC mailing list. I definately think it would, but we need to convince Andre (EAC author) :)

Split_wav can compensate for write offsets when splitting. Howewer, this is only if you have made a mistake when originally extracing and don't have the audio CD to make another rip from. You should NOT extract CDs to archive, with anything but a write offset of 0. ie. the read offset used should just be that of the reader and nothing else. This is because:

• Any writer offset within the wav file will be fixed for one particular writer. If you buy a new writer then you won't get perfect copies.
• If you give the files to a friend (legally) then they will probably be using a different writer and again get imperfect copies.
• When splitting into individual tracks there is a chance of a noticable click occuring.

Split_wav v2.0 is included in the Lameb.zip file.

This program can remove the embedded writer offset from a wav file for good. This enables you to correct a wav file that was extracted with a combined read+write offset. It can also put a write offset into a wav file for writing with burning software that doesn't support writer offsets; CDRWIN, Nero & Fireburner.

It's included in the Lameb.zip file.

This program can dump the CD data from the CDDB.DAT file into text format. EAC uses CDDB.DAT to store all the CD info (artist, title, year, etc.) that it has obtained from the CDDB and from you. Dump_cddb allows you to print, share, whatever your CD list. Several formats are supported. If you want any more then let me know.

It's included in the Lameb.zip file.

If you haven't already got it then you need to installed Perl for Windows to enable Lameb and the other tools to run. It's an 8MB download and requires about 20MB of storage space once installed. It isn't one of those apps that messes with the registry. It's available from here.

The file "Windows MSI" is Perl itself. It's in Microsoft Windows Installer format. If you don't already have Windows Installer v1.1 then you'll also find it on that page. You can install Perl for Windows to any drive you wish.

If you've ever had to put the id3 tags in manually you'll know just what a pain it is. There are so many id3 taggers out there it's a job in itself just to find a decent one. Then you've generally got to get it to match your mp3 filename format. This can be difficult as the final mp3 filename format does not lend itself to well to spliting into artist, album & title etc. i.e. quite often the '-' character is used as a seperator of album and title, but unfortunately albums and titles do have the '-' character in them. Try spliting this mp3 filename into album, artist and title with an id3 tagger:

 Right On! Vol 2 (12) Rubber Lips - Young - Holt Unlimited.mp3 

It's open to interpretation. You would have to manually fix problems like this. Lameb suffers none of these problems.

Putting the year and the genre in there is even harder. You generally have to do each album one at a time. Another enjoyable manual task. If you get a problem album you can find you're actually making 4 or 5 steps to encode just one CD. This is clearly a waste of your time.

Low Quality Disclaimer: Hey, I write software not web pages :)

Copyright © 2001 gildenman

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