OS X, MP3s & You

So, you're running Mac OS X, you like music, and you're tired of the low quality 128kbit MP3s offer you. What are you going to do? Get LAME.

1. Preparing OS X for terminal use
   
   1. Go to the Apple Developer's Site and register as a member. It's free, and gives you access to some handy downloads.
      
   2. If you're running 10.2, you'll want to get the July 2002 Mac OS X 10.2 Developer Tools and the August 2002 Dev Tools 10.2 Update. Older versions of OS X should probably use the December 2001 Mac OS X 10.1 Developer Tools with the December 2001 Mac OS X Developer Tools Update.
      
   3. Fix yourself a nice, cold drink while you wait for the Developer Tools to download. They're more than 200 meg, and will take a couple of minutes on just about any net connection...
      
   4. Install those on your system. There will probably be a lot of stuff you'll never use, but with NetBSD at the heart of OS X, having some UNIX compling tools really expands the amount of software you can run on your system.
      
   5. Run the Terminal app. (It's in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder). If you've never logged in as root from your terminal before, you'll want to type
      

      sudo passwd root

      to give yourself access.
      
   6. Mac OS 10.2 by default leaves out some of the more handy features of the tcsh shell. It also doen't put /usr/local/bin/ in your path. Typing
      

      more /usr/share/tcsh/examples/README

      will give you some details, but the quick and dirty solution would be to type
      

      sudo echo "source /usr/share/tcsh/examples/rc"     > /etc/csh.cshrc
      
      sudo echo "source /usr/share/tcsh/examples/login"  > /etc/csh.login
      
      sudo echo "source /usr/share/tcsh/examples/logout" > /etc/csh.logout

      It will prompt you for the password you created.
      
   7. Go ahead and type
      

      exit

      To log out of this terminal window. We'll come back in a bit.
      
   
   
2. Installing LAME
   
   1. Download and install LAME. Now that you have a compiler installed, you can download the source code. IE will download the .tar.gz file to your desktop and StuffIt Expander will automatically uncompress the file into a directory.
      
   2. Open a new Terminal window and type
      

      cd ~/Desktop/lame-3.92
      ./configure
      make
      sudo make install

      You will be prompted for the password you just created. If all has gone well, it should have created a file at /usr/local/bin/lame
      Type
      

      lame

      It should give you a short helpfile in response. You're almost there.
      
   
   
3. Adding iTunes support
   
   
   
   1. Next you'll need an AppleScript that will allow you to encode using LAME from within iTunes. I like the Convert to MP3 (LAME) script. Download the latest version to your desktop.
      
   2. UnStuff it
      
   3. In the finder, open the Library folder at the top of your boot drive.
      
   4. Create a new folder (if one doesn't already exist) for iTunes in the Library folder.
      
   5. Create a folder called Scripts inside the iTunes directory you just made.
      
   6. Drag the Encode with LAME script file from the folder where you unstuffed it into the scripts directory you made.
      
   
   
4. Using it
   
   
   
   1. Launch iTunes. You'll see a new menu in the menu bar with the script in it.
      
   2. Insert an audio CD that you'd like to rip.
      
   3. Select Encode with LAME from the Scripts menu
      
   4. For Encoding Options, type
      

      --r3mix -b112

      (See www.r3mix.net for reasons why this is a good idea...)
      
   5. Set the destination where you want your album saved.
      
   6. Press the Encode button.
      
   
   

You should be good to go!

Posted by Chuck at August 31, 2002 12:26 AM | TrackBack