so what to expect for lame 4?, and all about it Options

[adlai]

so, I have a few questions about LAME 4.

1. Who's developing it? LAME devs? Or wasn't some Japanese guy doing it?

2. If it's the future, why are other LAME versions being released?

3. what sort of quality will it be? from what I've seen, it's supposed to be really fast... which is nice, but that wouldn't matter if it's quality were not as good as 3.90.3

4. when will it come out?

[ezra2323]

Somewhat on topic......

The following is the official Hydrogen Audio position on LAME 3.90.3 and 3.96.1.

The presets (--alt-preset xxx) for the 3.90.X branch of LAME were designed by many of the original members of this site and were exhaustively tested to make sure that they utilized the best possible settings for quality. Subsequent versions of LAME broke compatibility with these presets to allow for many other improvements (faster, bug issues, etc), thus making a temporary regression in quality. LAME 3.96.1 seemed as though it might be about the same quality as 3.90.3 in some of the tests done after it was released. However, in the minds of the administration of this forum it has not yet been tested extensively enough, thus 3.90.3 is still the recommended version. LAME 3.96.1 has been proven to be of superior quality for some bitrates where there are no VBR presets for 3.90.3, only ABR. Thus 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard is considered to be better than 3.96.1 -V 2 (--preset standard) but 3.96.1 -V 5 (approximatly 128kb/s) is better then 3.90.3 --alt-preset 128. It is also worth noting that 3.96.1 is at least twice as fast as 3.90.3 for encoding and that -V 2 produces slightly smaller files then --alt-preset standard.

Given what we have read about 3.97 and 4.0 above (basically - they ar ethe focus and in development), can we assume that 3.96.1 will never be as well tested as 3.09.3??? If it will be tested extensively enough to be able to make a firm recommendation one way or another, who is doing this testing and when will it be completed?

Sorry for an "annoying" question but I see the 3.90.3 vs. 3.96.1 question and argument all over this forum.