The Linux MP3 HOWTO

9. Encoding from Audio.

Firstly, make sure you have enough space on your drive. At CD quality, 44.1 Khz 16 Bit stereo, 1 minute takes nearly 10 Mb (5 MB per channel).

I normally record at DAT quality, which is 48 Khz 16 Bit stereo.

Using wavrec I use the following syntax:

[dj at megajukebox]$ /usr/local/bin/wavrec -t 60 -s 48000 -S /mp3/temp.wav

The third option, -s 48000 refers to the sample rate in samples/sec. (48000 is the rate for DAT, 44100 is CD)

The last option is the path to the output file.

To see the full set of options, run waverec -help, or see it's man page.

This will produce your WAV file Next you will need to encode it into MP3 format.

Use bladdenc with the following command line.

[dj at megajukebox]$ /usr/local/bin/bladeenc <em/[source file] [destination file]/ -br 256000

The -br option sets the bit rate, in this case I've set the rate to the maximum rate of 256k bits/s. The path to bladeenc may also be different on your system to the one I've used in my example.

To see the full set of options, run bladeenc -help, actually this is an invalid option, but will display the list of options.

The same encoding using Lame (as well as Gogo as it is based on Lame) would need the command line

[dj at megajukebox]$ /usr/local/bin/lame <em/[source file] [destination file]/ -b 256