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.

[Yogiboar]

I always think of beta versions as 'unfinished'.

In the case of Nero, software is continually updated and recognised purely by its version number - in other words each version stands alone as a finished product [some may disagree with this!] but can be updated by later versions. Thus these are not betas.

I thus have some sympathy for the view that retaining the beta tag is confusing for some users, but at the end of the day if it works WTF does it matter.