There are threads that deal with this but they seem to be years old - as do the plugins in question... MAD for example seems to be an active project but the last Winamp plugin from it was 2001 (http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/mad-plugin)!!! or mpg123 (probably made redundant by the new default decoder now? http://www3.cypress.ne.jp/otachan/in_mpg123.html) which looks to be abandoned.

So what do you reckon? Use the default Nullsoft mpeg decoder in Winamp 5.0x? Or some other one I've not heard of?

What do you use?

Side bar: is it an advantage to use an mp3 decoder that can also change the bit-depth? eg scaling 16-bit CDA to 24bit (I tested this out but actually for me the 24bit sounded softer (aka worse ) than 16bit?!)

Don't use 24-bit for 16. It will most likely damage SQ.

After going to MAD from the default WinAMP 5 decoder, things sounded somewhat better. Slightly better detail. I'd say go for MAD.

By this point, if all decoders don't sound identical, there is something seriously wrong.

There are only 2 ways to decode an .mp3, correctly or incorrectly

go with the shibatch mpg123

But are there any new/current mp3 decoders or projects that anybody knows of?

Like I say, they're doing loads of work on MAD but they haven't updated the plugin for 4 years...

And Shibatch says this about mpg123 on his homepage (http://shibatch.sourceforge.net/):

Quote:



It's a good point about how mp3 decoders should all be pretty mature by now, and hence all just as accurate at decoding any given file (they can't be any better than 100% accurate after all, like you say); guess I'm hoping for some mp3 decoder that can eek even *more* quality out of mp3s

Please lemme know if anyone's using an mp3 decoder I've missed !