I'm trying to convert all my WMA's to MP3's. The problem is that LAME keeps crashing during transcoding. It also crashes when running KAudioCreator when ripping a CD. This has happened atleast twice in each process. When I say crash, I mean the system actually hard locks and I have to push the reset button.

I'm running LAME 3.98.2 on Slackware 12.2 with most of the security updates.

Would there a log created during the crash to try and figure out what happend? Should I just roll back LAME and hope it works?

Thanks for the last 5 years of help and beyond.

I think latest version of Lame is v3.98.1 (September 2008), ahh ok , i found it latest version really is 3.98.2 on download page. After compile it works just fine. KAudioCreator also, i dont know how you are converting wma to mp3, but wav to mp3 is fine. KAudioCreator makes temporary wav and after that convert it to mp3. I have Slamd64 12.2, but it is the same as Slackware 12.2
Try --verbose option, and what command do you use? Im not sure but i think you cant convert directly wma to mp3

The site shows 3.98.1 but when you download, it shows 3.98.2.

Hello Siqsuruq,

Sorry but latest version is indeed 3.98.2.

Refer to release note

I'm not sure lame can transcode directly WMA files into MP3.

While googling, there are numerous examples of WMA file conversion into MP3 that do the following:

convert WMA file into WAV file using mplayer
convert WAV file into MP3 file using lame

If you want a versatile audio/video converter, I would suggest to install ffmpeg. You can compile ffmpeg and its dependencies using Slackbuilds available at www.slackbuilds.org

You are right

Yeah, I should have said that I was using a script that used mplayer to convert to wave then LAME to MP3. The script I am using is at the URL below.
http://voidmain.is-a-geek.net/files/scripts/wma2mp3

I didn't mention it because it seemed to be related more to LAME than the script.

I will try the ffmpeg method later tonight.

Get a simple wav file, and encode that with lame directly from a terminal.

lame in.wav out.mp3 -V2

See if that works. If it does, error in the script. If your PC hard locks again, run memtest86. You could have a bad ram module.

Thanks for the suggestion. I am able to encode about 4-9 songs before hard locks using the script. I then used the command recommended by disturbed on a 2.5 hour wave file. It hard locked about 5 min into the encoding. Long story short, I ran the memtest86 and it found one bad byte in my RAM. It found this sometime during the 9 hours the test was running. It seemed to only show up once tho.

Here's my question from this point, would one byte really hard lock a system on a MP3 encoding? I'm having a hard time believing one byte would hard lock 4 different times. Or would actually be a random piece of....RAM.

Please excuse my ignorance, I want to understand what's actually happening. I will be moving my RAM around to test that as well (3 sticks).

Well, moved my RAM around and used different sticks. I'm trying to attach a picture of the screen. Sorry for the quality. Appears to me that the memory controller has went bad, maybe? Thanks for your help. I guess I'll try moving to a more hardware based forum and not clog up the Slackware forum. Once again thanks.

http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/5641/1002006hh9.jpg

I'm posting this reply to say I found the problem. The error was:

Kernel panic - not syncing: CPU Context Corrupt

I had my CPU overclocked from 2.8GHZ to 3.36GHZ and that what was causing the problem. I set the clock back to 2.8 and everything is good.

And if you run memtest again, your RAM errors should be gone as well