[plug] MP3

[Nick Bannon]

On Wed, Jul 28, 1999 at 12:28:20PM +0800, Greg Mildenhall wrote:
> I thought sound quality was meant to be the one reason for using
> bladeenc?? Wasn't it meant to be the best quality MP3ifier out there, at
> least at some stage? Presumably that means it is also very slow, so if
> you're not fanatical about sound quality, you might be able to do better.

http://home8.swipnet.se/~w-82625/encoder/quality.html

Fraunhofer has done a lot of work at optimising quality for low
bitrates. Hence when you want to fit as much quality as you can into
128Kbps or less, their encoders are pretty damn good - but it still
sounds bad on certain types of sounds. BladeEnc has different tradeoffs
and claims to have better quality at higher rates - 160Kbps and higher.

However... There's a marvellous new piece of software - LAME - Lame
Ain't an MP3 Encoder ;

http://www.sulaco.org/mp3/

It's distributed as GPL'ed patches to the freely available ISO sources,
rather than reimplementing the patented MPEG Audio Layer III routines
directly. To get people up and running, there's a very unofficial set
of precompiled binaries at ;

http://hive.me.gu.edu.au/not_lame/

It's wonderfully fast - 25% over realtime on each of my dual Celeron
300A's, faster still on some sounds (eg spoken words - over triple
realtime encoding speed). It's got a lot of new experimentation on the
psychoacoustic model, and the quality really shows. It supports variable
bitrate encoding - more data where it's needed in an audio stream,
less where quality won't suffer. Development is trundling along at a
good speed, but I've already tried an earlier snapshot (3.12b9) and
it went very well for me. For basic usage, it really is as simple as
"lame input.wav output.mp3".

It's ported far and wide - there's even a BLADEENC.DLL workalike for
Win32 encoder frontends.

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal