I currently use Exact Audio Copy with a LAME encoder which works perfectly. I am wondering if there is another encoder that will aloow VBR encoding or if there is some way to set the LAME encoder to go to a lower bitrate. I have a ton of audio that is just spoken so I don't need to waste the space of higher quality.

Thanks in advance.

ISTR that you set LAME.EXE up as another "external encoder", and pass it whatever parameters you choose.

The latest hydrogenaudio/rarewares build appaerently maps prest, alt-preset and VBR levels similarly - I think there is one extra qualifier that changes between the -Vn mode and the preset.

Higher Vn settings mean lower bitrate/quality, or you could use -preset nnn to select ABR mode... generally superior quality to CBR, but not as good as VBR if you can find a VBR mode that acheives the wanted average.

For spoken word recordings, you could also set "-M M" for mono mode, for optimum quality/bitrate results, though JS mode would result in a minimal encoding for the difference channel.

Thanks for your input. I tried to lower the bitrate settings to LAME and it set them higher than I wanted. I'll give it another try.

If you can attach a screen shot of the encoder configuration in EAC, we can tell you what's wrong.

http://users.pandora.be/satcp/eac-qs-en.htm
Has a reasonable guide, though you might want to revise the version and settings according to latest hydrogenaudio.org recommendations.

Using a custom command line, the bitrate option is generally not passed, though it could be used if you went for ABR.

Another "trick" is to use two custom settings, under the high quality and low quality options, so you could, for instance, have alt-preset standard (or other recommendation) as the high quality, and ABR mode with selectable average bitrate as the low quality - h'mm, though just a suggestion, it would have its uses - quality matters, or "size matters"

Matth, thanks for the link. I figured there would be a way to do this if I could just find the correct settings. EAC can be logical and yet, at times, it really helps to have someone who knows what they are doing. I'll give it another try tomorrow.

Now I see where I went wrong. I need command line options. And here I thought those went out with my 14k modem.