Hi!
I have a little question about the winamp plug-in. Many people recommended MAD plug-in...
What are the differences between MAD and the original one? Are there any other plug-ins and which of them are recommended?

Blah. Winamp default MP3 plugin is great. It's fast and very high quality. I see no reason to use MAD nowadays. Some people want 24 bit precision, but I doubt the quality differences can be perceived.

I think the main differences are:

- Support for output resolution of 24 and 32bits with appropriate sound cards.
- 16bit output with dither/noise shaping.
- Clipping auto-attenuation support.
- MP3 freeformat (over 320kbps) support.
- More precise/working length measurement of VBR files.

Hmmm... I don't think I can detect a difference with my lowly 16 bit card.. and I found a real annoyance (for me) in that when listening to streaming stations, whatever passing of the site title and URL, to things like the playlist and the mini browser, dosen't work...

Instead of seeing the site title in the title box and playlist, you see a bare IP address, and you don't get the site at all in the mini browser..

I've mentioned this to the author in email.. believe he needed info from Nullsoft? I'm not sure now what the reason was.. Have no idea what kind of timeframe a new version might be forthcoming..

I tried MAD a few weeks ago and it did not seem to support ID3v2 tags, so I stopped using it.

How do you go about making a freeformat mp3?
I noticed that lame cannot decode to wav with freeformat mp3's.
Any info or links would be great.

Thanks

Lame can only encode Freeformat MP3:s but the mpeg123 decoder engine cannot decode Freeformat, therefor you must use MAD for it...

Free-format files can be encoded by specifying the bitrate in Lame with the -b switch along with the --freeformat switch.

Example: Lame.exe --freeformat -b500 gives a 500kbps MP3. This is playable by the MAD winamp plugin (or presumably by MAD standalone too). I checked it myself just now; the latest MAD plugin could decode my 100, 300, 392, 500, and 640kbps test MP3's.

Lame.exe --alt-preset insane --freeformat -b640 sounded particularly good...

so if I install the mad plugin in winamp it will decode to wave?
That would be great cause I have a few mp3 files that were encoded with freeformat that i need to burn.

Thanks

Yes, if you use the "disk writer" output plug-in...

thanks, nice pic:D

That's odd, maybe you should report it as a bug in the plugin, the command line madplay supports ID3v2 (I don't know the exact version, the same one that lame uses).

--jth