Lame help

[zba78]

I have a 198MB wave file that I’m trying to convert to an mp3 file using lame. This is what happens when I try the following commands:

Lame –h –v 01.wav 01.mp3
The system hard freezes at about 35% - 40%

Lame –h 01.wav 01.mp3
The system hard freezes at about 65% - 70%

Lame 01.wav 01.mp3
The system hard freezes at about 80% - 95%

So then I split the wave file into to 99MB files and did:

Lame –h 01a.wav 01a.mp3
Lame –h 01b.wav 01b.mp3

And this worked fine. Which leads me to one of 2 conclusions.

1 – either lame cannot handle very large files
2 – lame on my system cannot handle very large files.

I have enough hard-disk space free (about 7GB) and have 512 physical RAM + 1GB swap.

BTW booted up to runlevel 3 and tried the same thing but got the same result.

Any advice please?

[Chris H]

Download audacity, load the wav and export as mp3.

[lordnothing]

or you could encode it to ogg-vorbis....

[zba78]

Thanks for the advice.

Sadly Audacity does the same thing, the system hard-freezes part way through the exportation process. I've adjusted the Bitrate down to 64 but that just makes it hard-freeze slighty later on (about 6 seconds left).

I really can't fathom this one...the one thing that does work is if I do

lame -f file.wav file.mp3

but the quality is greatly reduced. I guess the only thing to do is split the wav file into smaller chunks and convert each one individually.

BTW. what exactly is ogg vorbis? an audio format? and what program would convert a wave file to ogg vorbis? and will programs like xmms, xine play ogg vorbis? will ogg vorbis files play in windows?

[kriss]

Ogg Vorbis is a new audio compression format. It is roughly comparable to other formats used to store and play digital music, such as MP3, VQF, AAC, and other digital audio formats. It is different from these other formats because it is completely free, open, and unpatented.

From the vobis FAQ.

You can encode a wav file to a vorbis file with the application "oggenc".

And yes, nearly all somewhat new players support ogg vorbis like mplayer, xine, xmms, winamp etc etc

It also produces better sound quality pr. kb than what mp3 does.

Kriss

[Chris H]

Ogg Vorbis is excellent.

Audacity will also export as ogg.

[zba78]

Thanks all. I’ve downloaded vorbis-tools, libao, libogg, libvorbis. When I get home i’ll try to install them all (the RPMs).

Is it best to use oggenc to encode my wave files to ogg or will audacity have an option in the menu to ‘export to ogg’? What commands would I use with oggenc?

[Hellmasker]

audacity does support export to ogg.

when u say ur system freezes, are u sure its not just using swapfile, which woudl seem incredibly slow compared to ram and may well make ur system respond very slowly, but if this is the cause then it will eventually unfreeze

[Chris H]

If you don't have oggenc then audacity will ask you where it is if you try and export as ogg.

[zba78]

audacity does support export to ogg.

when u say ur system freezes, are u sure its not just using swapfile, which woudl seem incredibly slow compared to ram and may well make ur system respond very slowly, but if this is the cause then it will eventually unfreeze

Well according to KSim there is available RAM free, but CPU usage is constantly 99%-100% which is where I think the problem lies. I’m gonna give OGG a try and hope it helps. I must say, Audacity is a really great piece of kit