LAME 3.97 beta recommendation, At last. Options

[dev0]

LAME 3.97beta is now the officially recommended LAME version and switching is recommended to everybody.

This recommendation marks the death of the 3.90.X branch of LAME and the --alt-presets (or --presets) developed and tuned by Dibrom with help of many original members of this site in late 2001 establishing "the most concise, well tuned, and most thought out MP3 quality "paradigm" at the time.

The --alt-presets are now being abandoned in favour of the more flexible -V settings.

Thanks go out to the LAME developers and the (few) members of this site, who helped testing recent LAME versions. An outstanding amount of that work has been done by Guruboolez, whom this community owes a lot for all the days and nights he spent testing and discussing.

The recommended settings thread already accomodates this anticipated change and should answer most questions about the new -V system and --vbr-new.

[Lyx]

Yay! It was about time....... back to reality, from now on.

edit: those who complain about beta-status obviously did not follow up on what happened in the recent months and weeks. Besides, a beta is not that bad..... i would begin to worry if it would be an alpha, but beta nowadays doesnt mean that much..... unless its foobar2000 ;-)

This post has been edited by Lyx: Oct 4 2005, 09:33

[Maurits]

edit: those who complain about beta-status obviously did not follow up on what happened in the recent months and weeks.

I know it's safe to use, I know it 'took' 12 beta-versions to get up to this point, I know why it should be recommended. I followed it's stages to reach this point.

The question is whether the name reflects this and whether it's wise to keep on calling it a beta when it's obviously safe to use. People who haven't followed it's development will have a choice between 3.90.3, 3.96.1 and 3.97beta, the 3.90.3 numbering-issue (with the code-fork) is hard enough as it is. We all want everyone to use this, not just frequent HA-visitors, don't we?

I am aware though that its up to the developers to decide, not to the people on HA making recommendations, it was merely a question as to when the word beta gets stripped...


EAC is a funny example but don't forget there are no non-betas to obtain of EAC whereas there are a lot of non-betas available for Lame, even the dreaded 3.93 is a non-beta!

This post has been edited by Maurits: Oct 4 2005, 10:02

[Egor]

...
The question is whether the name reflects this and whether it's wise to keep on calling it a beta when it's obviously safe to use.
...

Probably it should be renamed to 'Release Candidate' or 'Technical Preview' not to confuse people. Descriptive wording would certainly result in increased attraction and therefore intense usage. (I assume the change of the recommended version was a measure to put release candidate to mass testing.)