Since COVID-19 began, it has fallen to me to edit broadcasts for the radio each week. The radio wants an mp3 encoded at 128 kbps. I wanted to automate this process, of course. I already had Lame (https://lame.sourceforge.io) installed on my computer, so, after just a tiny bit of research, I came up with this command to use in the Terminal: /usr/local/bin/lame -b 128 -h

The -b 128 specifies the bitrate; the -h specifies “high quality.” (One can view all the command line options here: https://www.esm.rochester.edu/ears/docs/lame/switchs.html.)

At the end of that, with a Finder window open on my Mac, I can drag the .wav file right into the Terminal, and the proper path is automatically inserted. The final command looks like this: /usr/local/bin/lame -b 128 -h /Users/daniel/Documents/REAPER\ Media/radio-july26-lev.wav

I love that Terminal automatically escapes the spaces in the path … it’s a lovely little extra that makes me smile.

Indeed, this all works very well. It takes just over a minute to encode a half-hour mp3. I then upload the file to Dropbox and send the radio station the link. Easy-peasy. ◼︎