BladeEnc 0.9.4.2 review
DownloadBladeEnc is a freeware MP3 encoder
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BladeEnc is a freeware MP3 encoder. It is based on the same ISO compression routines as mpegEnc, so you can expect roughly the same, or better, quality . The main difference is the appearance and speed.
BladeEnc doesn't have a nice, user-friendly interface like mpegEnc, but it is more than three times faster, and it works with several popular front-end graphical user interfaces.
BladeEnc's output quality is one of those rare subjects that completely divides the world in two parts. Either you love it or you hate it, there never seems to be an opinion inbetween. Different audiophiles and mp3 experts tends to come to completely different conclusions depending on their methods and testsamples.
The reason for this is of course that BladeEnc is a very different mp3 encoder (compared to Fraunhofer, LAME etc) with a very unique approach to mp3 encoding.
In order to compress sound to an mp3 file, you need to make certain sacrifices in quality. Taking into account how we percieve sound, the mp3 encoder tries to remove the details that it believes us to be least likely to notice. How much that needs to be removed depends on the bitrate and the encoder often has the choice of doing different kinds of sacrifices.
It can remove low volume tones that are "shadowed" by high volume tones of similar frequencies, remove the high frequency part of the sound spectrum, cut down the stereo effect (so called joint stereo) and simply decrease the samplerate. What approach is the best depends on a lot of things, like the style of music and the selected bitrate.
Here are some key features of "BladeEnc":
Sourcecode available under the LGPL-license!
Stereo or Mono output. Can downmix to Mono on the fly.
Supports the following bitrates: 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 and 320 kBit/s. However, for bitrates lower than 128 kBit we seriously recommend you to use another encoder.
Flags like Private, Original and Copyright can be set.
Input samples can be in either 32, 44.1 or 48 kHz.
Both 8 and 16-bit samples are supported.
Working CRC checksum generation (since 0.80). The ISO reference code had broken CRC calculations, which has been inherited into every ISO based encoder that haven't added a fix for it.
Can be plugged directly into many popular 3rd party products, giving them integrated mp3 encoding abilities.
Encodes chunks of data from memory to memory, no need to use files or pipes.
Can be compiled for nearly any operating system still in use.
Commandline based, makes it easy to include BladeEnc into BAT files and shell scripts.
Only mp3 encoder that supports gapless encoding.
Reads standard uncompressed WAV- and AIFF-files as well as well as RAW PCM-data.
Batch encoding. Can encode any number of samples in a row.
Wildcards supported. You can for example encode all WAV-files in a directory by typing *.WAV".
Input samples can be automatically deleted after encoding.
Large selection of graphical frontends available.
Task priority can be set from the commandline and is by default set to LOWEST so that you still can use your computer effectively while encoding (Windows & OS/2 only).
Full support for pipes and redirection (stdin and stdout).
Textbased configuration file where you can change default settings.
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