Having procured some new music for the first time in a bit of a while, I'm reminded what a handy tool the iTunes LAME Encoder is.

For those unfamiliar, it's an AppleScript that provides all the glue needed to hitch iTunes up to LAME -- an mp3 encoder that, despite its seemingly self-deprecating acronym of a name, is a good deal faster than iTunes' built-in encoder (last I checked), and seems to produce higher quality audio for a given bitrate.

Installation is pretty straightforward, and well worth the effort: Download and unpack a copy of the LAME source code from here, and build and install using the standard incantation:

./configure
make
sudo make install

(lame-3.92.tar.gz builds without a hitch on Mac OS X 10.2.4, using the December 2002 Developer Tools.) Then download a copy of the iTunes LAME Encoder script from here (1.0.4b has been the latest version for a while, and seems pretty stable), and copy the "Encode with LAME" script file into Library/iTunes/Scripts under your home directory (creating intermediate directories as needed). That's it! You're ready to start encoding mp3s using LAME!

The next time you launch iTunes, you should see a script icon in your menu bar. Choosing "Encode using LAME..." from this menu is all you have to do to start the script and begin encoding a CD. The "iTunes LAME Encoder" script automates the process of calling out to the "lame" command-line tool to encode audio tracks into .mp3 files, making sure those files get their ID3 tag info set correctly (by handing off to lame the info that iTunes has for the source tracks, which it usually fetches automatically from CDDB when you insert a CD), and adding the resulting .mp3 files to your iTunes Library.

Encoding with "-h -b 160" ("high" quality, 160kbps fixed bit rate), I get results as good or better than using iTunes' built-in encoder at 192kbps with "Filter Frequencies Below 10 Hz" disabled. The only problems I've had with it are easily worked around:

1. Occasionally, the script will fail to connect up with the child script it generates to do the work of handing off to lame. When this happens, just choose the "Encode with LAME..." menu item again; it always works the next time.
2. If, after inserting a CD, you change the album name or track names, you'll need to eject and reinsert the CD to sync those changes up to the file system's view of the disc, or the encoder script will be unable to find the track files.