[wavoman]

Just saw this:

RareWares

 

[whuffor]

Nice with a new release, although it doesn't look like earth shattering improvements. A bug fix and id3 tag for album art is what I see at a glance.

 

[krmathis]

Yeah, and guess who compiled the Mac OS X binary.

 

[wavoman]

Thank you krmathis!

I still use PCs 'cause of work, but I am counting the days (just over 2 years) until I retire then I throw all these in the trash and buy the latest, and matching, Macs for me and the wife.

A lot of our guys have already made the switch, including our corporate lawyer, head of IT, head of support, etc. but I am afriad ... I could run Windows on the Mac but that seems pointless. I represent the company in public and in the meetings I go to you have to carry a ThinkPad to be "in".

Thanks again for your dedication to open source.

 

[E.B.M.Head]

Quote:

Originally Posted by whuffor /img/forum/go_quote.gif Nice with a new release, although it doesn't look like earth shattering improvements. A bug fix and id3 tag for album art is what I see at a glance.

Well, the sandpaper noise issue with some music (trumpets, complex electronical music) is nearly gone now. I prefered the Helix encoder to 3.97, but 3.98 is even better than the Helix encoder.

 

[Goit]

LAME is lame. Fraunhofer is much better.

 

[wavoman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Goit /img/forum/go_quote.gif LAME is lame. Fraunhofer is much better.

Big discussion going on over that exact point on another thread. Not everyone agrees. Of course Fran did invent MP3, gotta give you that. I have not experimented, not qualified to comment (I find LAME OK for me, don't do much MP3, just wanted the latest version!). Use Search ...

Added ... OK I found the thread:

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f46/wh...ght=Fraunhofer

 

[majkel]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Goit /img/forum/go_quote.gif LAME is lame. Fraunhofer is much better.

Very, very true. Some people want to kill me when I say this. Compare 320 kb/s CBR LAME and FhG to the original on a decent DAP or a better device and see/hear the difference. LAME is terribly slow encoder as well.

Helix? My first impression was WOW, after that I find it's sound inacurate and fatiguing. LAME is better.

To the LAME fans - is there any SQ improvement with the 3.98 over the 3.97? I remember that between 3.90.3 and 3.96 there was no progress, rather sonic regression. 3.97 finally reached/conquered the 3.90.3 SQ but after very long period.

 

[deviationer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Goit /img/forum/go_quote.gif LAME is lame. Fraunhofer is much better.

Fraunhofer = $$$

 

[E.B.M.Head]

Frauenhofer is junk like Blade or Xing. It's easily ABXable in CBR mode and even worse in VBR mode. It has still the smearing and preecho artefacts that the buggy reference encoder had that they once wrote for the MPEG consortium. The MPEG and ISO reference encoders and decoders are just a quickly hacked together piece of code to show how to write a working encoder. Nobody is expected to use it in real life, but sadly most early encoders where based on that reference code (Blade, 8Hz, and LAME up to 3.80). LAME started to use its own psycho accustics, since 3.00 because the Frauenhofer Psychoaccustiks contains some serious bugs.
LAME 3.90 ~ 3.93 where good, but then they lost it somehow. I had to send a remix to a befriended Artist over the Net and he had some problems depacking my FLAC version of the remix. So I tried Lame 3.95 and it sounded crap to me, I tried 3.97 -vbr-new -V 0 -q 0 and it was a bit better but still crap. Because I've read some good remarks about the Helix MP3 Encoder I tried that next. With V150 the anoying artefacts from LAME where gone, but Helix had some problems with the heavy spartial effects I was using in that remix (which LAME 3.97 didn't have). I was about to give up, when I decided to give the alpha of LAME 3.98 a last chance (I think it was about the time of A2 when I downloaded the source and compiled it). I hadn't high hopes, but the -V 0 encode was nearly perfect. The grainy noise was gone and also the spartial effects where perfect. The difference was so minimal to the original (I had a hard time to hear a difference at all) so that I decided to send him the LAME 3.98 -V 0 encode.
The Encoder is one thing, the decoder another. The MP3 decoders of Windows Media and Quicktime are not very good. If you want to make full use of all features (Bitrate reservoir, Freeformat, 24 bit resolution etc.) then you have to look for alternatives. The MAD library that most freeware and shareware players use is probably the best decoder.
There are a lot of urban myths about MP3, like:
- Frauenhofer did develope the MP3 codec (which is only partly true. They did develope a big part and wrote the reference encoder for the MPEG consortium, big main parts where developed by AT&T, Philips and Thomson)
- Stereo is better than Joint Stereo (That was only true for MP2, but even in the beginning of MP3 the results with Joint Stereo was better. The encoder has more room to encode this way as the differences between left and right channel are often marginal).
- CBR is better than VBR (it was only true in the beginning, but modern encoders make better use of the bit reservoir while even save some space that is bloated up with null bytes when you encode to CBR 320 kbps)
- MP3 is sonicaly better than MP2 (which is not true as the MP3 Design has serious flaws. But MP3 was the first format which offered acceptable quality at a low bitrate that you could download with an anlogue modem in no big time and that helped it to become this popular.)

Lame 3.98 sounds better than 3.97 with trumpets, distorted guitars and synthesizers.

 

[royalcrown]

Quote:

Originally Posted by E.B.M.Head /img/forum/go_quote.gif Lame 3.98 sounds better than 3.97 with trumpets, distorted guitars and synthesizers.

I find that very hard to swallow, considering the 3.98 release notes say nothing about changing the actual encoding algorithm.