lame gets press coverage in Germany's respected c't computer magazine
which will appear on newsstands tomorrow, monday.
They feature an 5 pp article covering mp3 and linux. In the encoding
part, they compare bladeenc, lame, xing and FhG. Unfortunately they
do not mention any version number, but as c't appears every two weeks
and the author knew about sulaco.org, lame might not have been older
than 4 weeks.
The article mentions Bladeenc's "questionable legal position", that
lame is going a different way by distributing patches against ISO
sources "but meanwhile there are already patched sources and compiled
binaries available in the net also".
It falls a bit short when listing GPSYCHO, Joint stereo and VBR but
fails to explain their meanings/implications to the reader.
Compared in speed, Xing was the fastest (4 min for a 10 min track
on a PII-400), lame came in second (6 min), bladeenc third (14 min),
FhG last (nearly 90 min). Again, no indication of parameters.
In the audio tests, they mp3'd five sinus-curves; FhG and lame were
the best in reproducing them. (whatever that means).
The real listening tests were won by FhG (1st) and Xing (2nd), with
Xing being the favorite of the Classic Music expert.
Bladeenc: "All testers agreed that the tracks encoded by Bladeenc
with 64 kBit/s were right away unenjoyable and fell way behind the
other decoders [well, ENcoders :)] at 128 kBit/s too. [...] Use of
bladeenc is not recommended. At 64 kBit/s the program produces so
much artefacts that the music is rightaway distorted. Those who
want to use a free encoder cand find it in lame, a fast and good
program which fells only slightly behind the reference FhG. Even
at 64 kBit/s lame produces quite respectable results, which is
especially important to owners of mobile mp3 players with their
limited memory capacity. And for the HiFi-qualities of normal PCs
its 128 kBit/s files are way sufficient."
To me, this shows how much lame has been improved by you compared to
the original ISO sources.
sulaco.org, prepare to be slashdo...c't'ed :)
Frank
P.S.:
some (few) c't articles are also published online at www.heise.de,
so you could use bablefish if this article is one of them. Frankly,
there should not be too much news in it for the members of this list.
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