Phil Gyford

Writing

Thursday 23 September 2004

PreviousIndexNext Encoding with the very latest LAME in iTunes

A couple of years back I wrote about how to encode MP3s using the LAME encoder, which is (or can be) superior to iTunes’ built-in option. This all got rather simpler last year with a newer version of the iTunes-LAME Encoder software.

So, to continue the yearly updates, I wanted to point out that it’s possible to easily use the same handy, shiny software interface with a more up-to-date version of LAME than the one it has built in. One option is to compile a newer version of LAME yourself, but that sounds like way too much command line trouble if you ask me. But a post in this thread suggests that you can simply:

  • Grab the latest compiled version of LAME for Mac OS X from this page at RareWares.
  • Control-click on your copy of the iTunes-LAME Encoder application and select ‘Show Package Contents’.
  • Replace the now revealed ‘lame’ file within the application with the one you downloaded from RareWares.

Easy peasy. I can’t tell the difference at all of course, but the folk on Hydrogenaudio’s forums can probably suggest plenty of reasons why a 0.01 version upgrade will make all the difference, should you require justification.

Comments

Hi there
All this sounds great :) but does it work on PCs?

Cheers

Posted by Tonio on 14 November 2004, 3:41 am | Link

Itunes-Lame is broken under itunes 7.1 and later and it seems there is no hope for a fix. The issue is with Track ID3 tagging FYI. Check out the Blacktree forums for more info. forums.blacktree.com/

Posted by Kevin on 26 June 2007, 8:18 pm | Link

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