Is anyone here familiar with the Mp3 Scene release groups? If so i need a little help. In my personal opinion, FNT makes the best quality rips. Can anyone tell me what command line FNT uses to encode in LAME? I have downloaded 2 of their releases (SR-71 - Here We Go Again, Sum 41 - Chuck) and the quality rules. I wanna rip like they do. I doubt anyone knows the command line so is there a way that I could take one of their mp3s and break it down to know what they did with it? thanks, help would be much appreciated. what i DO know about it that it is in some sort of VBR joint-stereo but it is NOT alt preset standard and i'm pretty sure it isn't extreme or insane either.

Well if the quality is awesome then is must be alt-present standard or insane or extreme.
The reason is that the loss with the alt preset comand is transpaerent. So there is no audible sound loss.

hmm... well i've decided i'm gonna try to make my own command lines. But i'm having some difficulty. I am using EAC/LAME and I have it set to 'user defined encoder' and i'm using lame.exe But when ever it goes to compress a file, LAME blinks up for about a millisecond then dissapears and it says 'audio extraction complete' but it didn't compress anything. is there something wrong with my command line? here it is: -v -b 192 -m j --resample 44.1 -h do i have to have them in a certain order or am i missing something or what?

first of all do not set it to "User defined encoder" Set it to Lame mp3 encoder.
checkout the lame documentation for info about command lines

This should satisfy you if you use LAME 3.96.1 or later and disable EAC's ID3 tagging.

User defined encoder:
Addictional command line options: --preset extreme --add-id3v2 --pad-id3v2 --ta "%a" --tt "%t" --tl "%g" --ty "%y" --tn "%n" --tc "Insert comment" %s %d
//Danne

I have no idea what release groups use, but for the best possible mp3 quality you should use LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset insane.

Also make sure you have configured EAC properly for your drive.

In current LAME versions, or at least in HydrogenAudio recommended ones, using command line options is deprecated.

The presets are tuned, TUNED, TUNED!!!
In later versions, they are not even "ALT" - just PRESET

STANDARD - VBR Preset, typical average 190k, transparent (no audible loss) to most user/material
EXTREME - VBR Preset, typical average 250k, for more demanding material and critical listening
INSANE - CBR 320k, the maximum for MP3 without using free format - the only thing this will save you from, over EXTREME, is problems with VBR handling

Other preset modes available are ABR
PRESET number
Gives you a guaranteed bitrate average and file size, useful if the file size uncertainty of VBR is a problem, but the size/quality is not as good as VBR

And CBR
PRESET CBR number
Constant bitrate, with limited carry/borrow using a bit reservoir - as this has to use the same bitrate for easy and difficault passages alike, size/quality is inferior to both ABR and VBR - the only reason to favour CBR, is if you know the target platform supports CBR, but are uncertain about ABR