wiki documentation at http://www.audiocoding.com/wiki/index.php?page=MP3 states (portions snipped):


Quality varies widely between available encoders.

* High quality implementations:
o Recent Fhg implementations
* Very low quality implementations:
o some old versions of Fhg encoders


How can I distinguish between recent and old? I use encspot basic and I see fastenc, mp3enc, etc.

Most reliable way is to listen to them. FhG's slow codec (mp3enc) sounds ok most of the time except for a stronger lowpass in its command line version (14.5 kHz as opposed to 16 kHz), and occasional glaring low-frequency artifacts (dropouts, glitches, knocking).

FhG's fast codec (fastenc) doesn't have the glaring low frequency artifacts, but a few people do not like its high frequency sound as much as the slow codec's, and prefer it even with the presence of low-frequency glitching.

ff123

Edit: some of the older versions were buggy (stereo collapse, bad high frequency sound). You can read about some of this stuff at my website:

http://ff123.net/

do u mean the so-called problems with joint stereo above 160kbps? - I knew lots of people that thought it was a problem with all encoders - and refused to use --alt-preset standard due to it

Nope. The stereo collapse issue is/was an extremely serious bug in the FhG encoder, it has nothing to do with the simple stereo vs. joint stereo issue. The bug was present at least in the leaked fastenc.exe and certain versions of certain programs.