funkatron.com

Hiwattfan says...

Thank you for such a wonderful program!  I hope this project will survive because LameBrain is an intuitive program that I have found no substitute for.  After spending much time encoding my cd library in AAC format, I came to the conclusion that the LAME mp3 is far more “musical”.  I find it to be warmer and have more depth in the soundstage.  I must admit that at low bitrates the AAC is a better choice, but using a more transparent bitrate setting in LAME sounds much more like the original cd track.  Just my opinion, but thank you just the same for taking time to write LameBrain.
-----

Ed says...

I’m glad you like it!  I may at some point revisit the project, but for now I’m interested in other things, and LB seems to serve its purpose well.

Jim says...

LameBrain is almost ideal for me. But since I do classical music, it would be good if you could also contact cddb for information. Freedb usually does not have my CDs. And also, there seems to be no way to upload my manually-entered information back to them.

Ed says...

The reason I used FreeDB is that CDDB access is now a pay-for proposition.  That pretty much makes it impossible to utilize it in Free/Open Source software, unless it’s backed by a large company with other revenue streams (like iTunes).

One possibility would be to somehow leverage iTunes’ identification of the CD.  If I ever work with LameBrain again, I’ll consider that.

daniel says...

i recently got my mac and i’m sad to say i don’t understand how to ‘install’ this program (i’m running in from the dmg because it doesn’t load when i just drag and drop the app file to the applications folder). i understand you’ve dropped development, but it would be great to see more support in the (near!) future because i’ve been booting to windows to use cdex to rip my cds, and i’d really like to be able to do it in os x.

if you do pick it back up and want to do something with handling extended ascii characters, cdex (in windows) does a good job with it by letting you choose how to handle common characters individually (for example, with ‘?’ and ‘:’ i like to just have it ignore them when writng the filename, but for ‘/’ or ‘’ i like it to put a space so if i had a song called artist - title/title? it would output the filename as artist - title title.mp3 instead of artist - title_title_.mp3)

for what the program does, it’s already a billion times better than stupid itunes, and for that i thank you.

Ed says...

Daniel:

I don’t distribute LB as a DMG anymore—the “Source Code” link above will give you the whole shebang you need.  It sounds like you might just be putting the LameBrain executable file into your Applications dir, and not all the extra directories.  LB needs all of those other directories to function properly.

I’d make an /Applications/LameBrain folder and copy everything from the DMG into it.

daniel schroeder says...

thanks, i’m still retarded trying to figure out how mac programs ‘work’, but i made that folder like you said and it’s working great now.

looking forward to a future update...you should specify how much of a donation you need to make it better ;)

Ed says...

Don’t feel bad—most Mac apps are more self-contained than LameBrain.  It’s a pretty odd setup.

Right now, it’s really a matter of having time.  Maybe enough to take 2 months off work.  You have an extra $10k? ;)

evan stone says...

Looks like we may need to have the msgWindow and shortMsgWindow files added to the source… when I load the project, it tries to connect via AFP to “whitesnake” (which of course it can’t), and it barfs and then asks to relocate those files… any chance we could get those put into the zip?

thanks!

p.s. do you have any intention of open source-ing the project?

Edward Finkler says...

Gah, I’ll look into that as soon as I can. you might want to email me about it.

I consider the project “open source” now, although maybe I forgot to include a License file. I’ll use a New BSD-style license, FWIW.

Bartimus says...

Interesting read. Something i’ll def would be using.

Cretou says...

Nicely written. I can relate to most of your points.

Buy discount iPods says...

is LameBrain only for mac or for windows also?

Jim says...

Thanks for the great encoding software.  Encoding options have come a long way in four years, but Lame has proven a stable and reliable mp3 pal.