- Everyon pretty much knows already The LAME codec is renowned for being the best and highest quality mp3 codec today. ESPECIALLY at medium-level bitrates, such as above 128. For example at 160 and 192, which provides an optimum balance of speed, space, compatibility and sound quality.

- If you don’t know this, then some audiophile experience and basic sound training is in order. (And before you start jumping at the keyboard flailing acronyms like FLAC, APE, OGG, WMA, etc. Don’t bother. This is about mp3’s. Many portable players which are what people are using nowadays do not handle FLAC, APE, and few OGG. WMA is Microsoft, still not as versatile as mp3. Not supported by all players, subject to DRM, a bit smaller, entangled in MS licensing mechanism.)

- Agreed, LAME is advanced, and not well understood by amateur users who have not studied psychoacoustics, psychophysics, and have experience as an audio or recording engineer. You can tell those that may be in the codec novice area because they don’t get the name’s origin but instead think it’s ‘lame’. Kind of like a teen would get their endless amusement about the word “uranus” snickering and guffawing “your anus, hee hee hee. get it? your anus? ha ha ha haha” giggling to no end, But to a person who is actually at the NASA level and at the eschelon of studying Astrophysics, this gets old, fast. Such as it is with the word “LAME CODEC”. And although it is one of the most advanced, thankfully a lot of the LAME codec parameters, including the VBR and the Q factor used in the LAME codec have been set by default for you and home users don’t have to change much of anything.

-MARK, LAME codec is OPEN SOURCE.

-MARK, if you check your ‘audiograbber’ program that you said you like, it USES the LAME codec.

-CDEX was written BY one of the lead engineers ON the LAME codec project team. Audiograbber was not. But if you like that one, you can surely use audiograbber if you want. Audiograbber has a nice GUI, but the reason people don’t use AudioGrabber was because the author sold out at one point to “XING”. XING made a HORRIBLE encoder! He sold his sister program “AudioCatalyst” to them. AC was free and nearly a clone of AG except it used the awful XING encoder. And until his non-compete contract ran out, AudioGrabber used to be shareware and demand a fee. CDEX has always been free. So you may use whatever you like, but since the author of cdex was on the actual project team that developed the best encoder in existence, I prefer that. Your mileage may vary.

-Even Exact Audio Copy, EAC, known as the highest quality ripper uses the LAME codec. (EAC is high quality, employing rigorous error correction, and anti-jitter, but not as quick & dirty as CDEX) Either one is ok, but CDEX is just more convenient when you want to rip & go with less futzing and tweaking of EAC.

“Written by: audiophile | Rating: 5 | Date: 16 Apr 2006

“No doubt about it, lame is the highest quality encoder. For the longest time, I used BLADE ENC at 256kbps. But a friend switched me over and I swear I can tell no difference from a 320kbps MP3 encoded w/ LAME to the original audio cd. Apple should ditch their useless AAC and opt for MP3’s encoded with lame. The highest quality I’ve yet to come across, next to lossless, of course.”

Even Exact Audio Copy, the platinum standard in perfect ripping, uses the LAME codec.

AFTERDAWN.com review:
“LAME MP3 encoder is the only codec is actually being developed and improved. The outcome of the developement work of the LAME open source community is that LAME outperforms all commercial MP3 encoders as well as other free ones.

LAME gives you good speed, best quality and huge amount of options and flexibility. This is a commandline utility you can setup for use with good quality ripper, such as Exact Audio Copy ”

For more information, you may check out the Frequency Domain Half-Sweeps and digital sample graphs HERE:

http://ff123.net/signatures.html

–

-Pauloparra