 "Roundup of MP3 Encoders")
It’s the most popular thing to have happened to recorded music in the 90s. Yes, I’m referring to the MP3 format. Audiophiles hate it, but the rest of the world loves it. Musicians may be a dying breed, but who cares? After all, we get speeds in excess of 250K these days…
In 1987, some German dudes (Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten, and Ernst Eberlein.) at some German company (Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft) started some random project (EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting) and finally came up with the MP3 format, which all of you know is a part of MPEG’s standards. MP3 is only for audio, and basically compresses the file size of the original wav by quite a large amount, resulting in loss of audio quality. (That’s why audiophiles hate it.)
The guys who invented it patented their encoder and started enforcing it on every software and player that came out. Pretty soon there came a need for other types of encoders; algorithms made by other programmers e.g LAME. So now we have a few choices out there that all do the same thing of compressing audio, or pirating music, but do so in different ways. I’ve given some links and linfo on each codec that I think is the biggest and best, but suggestions are welcome…
Fraunhofer Codec
Software name: Musicmatch jukebox
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The most famous software that uses the Fraunhofer codec is the Musicmatch Jukebox (now Yahoo Jukebox) software. It is one of the most famous MP3 utilities on the net; in fact it’s been around since the time I got my first PC. It has a friendly GUI and the basic version is free, which I think is enough really, as the other features are not of use in the context we are talking about: MP3 encoding.
The drawbacks are that it is a little slow; even the latest Yahoo version doesn’t match up to the swanky and fast alternatives out there. The quality of MP3 encoding is questionable at lower bitrates, though at higher bitrates it is very good. The high frequency components are what you should check mainly when checking an MP3, and this piece of software creates fine ones at the higher end of the bitrate spectrum.
LAME Codec
Software name: CDex
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LAME Codec is huge these days, and is available with many software, including Exact Audio Copy, which is already featured in our Download Section. I will name another one which I like; it’s a free ripper and encoder called CDex. This piece of software is light, its simple and mainly its quite fast. The developer of the software, Albert Faber, works on the LAME project itself, so its authentic work. I really like the software, as it has cool features like jitter correction, track name retrieval from CDDB, etc.
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AudioCatalyst
Xing Codec
Software name: AudioCatalyst
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The Xing codec is not as omnipresent as the others mentioned above, though it is well-known and does have some good features. Xing has a cool software of its own, called Xing Encoder, but it’s not free. In fact finding free software that supports this codec is tough, especially a dedicated one. But AudioCatalyst 2.1 has a good enough trial version. Audiocatalyst is a comprehensive software, with a nice GUI and easily accessible functions. It is very fast, though the quality at 128 Kbits is not as good as LAME’s. It comes with Xing MP3 player, which is a cool-looking, nifty job.
Blade Codec
This one is the best of the lot, and also the most professional. It was started by a single programmer (Tord Jannson), who was distributing the Blade encoder free as an executable file. Though currently available as a command line code, the original algorithm is based on ISO-specified code from Fraunhofer, so patent issues come in the way.
There’s software to support BladeEnc though. CDex, Exact Audio Copy, Audiograbber and a few others all support it, so go ahead and try the versions. Paradoxical as it may seem, I would like to state that pirating music is wrong. I will also say that MP3s sound like crap when compared to the real recording, especially if the music is acoustically recorded, and has detail and depth.
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