LAME – Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase. This is a great Wiki that gives the settings for the latest versions of LAME MP3 encoder. To summarize,
For High quality listening, you can basically encode at 190Kbps to 230Kbps, which correspond to –preset fast standard and –preset fast extreme. Personally, I encode at –preset fast extreme because I’m assuming hard disks are going to be big and being 10% bigger isn’t a big issue. Also since I tend to use nice headphones, I’ve noticed that this does make a difference.
For typical portable (read iPod) with the standard earbuds, you don’t need anything nearly has high quality. You can get away with 115-160Kbps. This corresponds to -V3 -vbr-new up to –preset fast medium.
For voice such as CD audiobooks, you should probably flip to average bit rate rather than variable bit rate and the correct paramet is –abr 96 for instance to get 96Kbps.
If you want to connect EAC to LAME, then this will give the highest quality ripping, you should make the following changes so that tags are correctly inserted:
# Choose EAC/Compression Options/External Compression and check “Use external compression”
# Change Parameter passing scheme to “User Defined Encoder”
# Change Use file extension to .mp3
# Browse to fine the lame.exe
Now to create the something with all the necessary tags in this case ID3v1 and ID3v2, the string is:
bq. %l–abr 96%l%h–preset extreme%h –add-id3v2 –pad-id3v2 –ta “%a” –tt “%t” –tg “%m” –t1 “%g” –ty “%y” –tn “%n” %s %d
