so, I got these two programs and installed them, and they work, but i find they are very slow, EAC is about 7*, and lame is from 2-4*, is there any way to make it like triple? if i dont care too much about quality? i have a 1gig athlon and run win2000 any suggestions? thanks
EAC is slow, because it verifies the ripping results. This diesn't matter too much as long as it is faster than LAME (so that EAC is not the bottleneck). LAME is slow because it makes a good job in encoding music. It sounds good. There are faster settings available, but at the cost of losing quality: http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/1912
For EAC you could use burst mode with test & copy. If you enable writing log files, you can afterwards check the logs to see if CRCs of test + copy are identical. If yes, security is (almost) as high as in secure mode, if no, you might want to re-rip using secure mode. About encoding speed: Does it have to be mp3? Musepack (mpc) is faster and has better quality/size ratio. Only one portable player supports it though, and that unit is onyl available in China. If it must be mp3, I'd first try fast presets (--alt-preset fast standard), if it's still too slow, try CBR (e.g. --alt preset CBR 192).
well i do have a sony pda with 256 meg card, so i could use amtrac, or whatever the sony encoding is called, does anyone know of a good encoder for it, i hear it is smaller format than mp3 thanks
Sony's ATRAC3 is a better format, but atm the only encoder is SonicStage Simple Burner and it's one horrible program and DRM mess (for one, you have to rip each CD anew for each CD you burn)...it pains me to think Sony screwed its customers like this!