Tord Jansson (BladeEnc developer) officially announces that he will stop developing his mp3 encoder:

BladeEnc homepage

Among the reasons for his decision:
*Today we have a better alternative in Ogg Vorbis.
*Audio encoding technology has never really been my cup of tea
*...and felt that other free encoders (most notably LAME) did a much better job for the average mp3 user

Must be said that I believe he surely had a part in the popularity of the mp3 format nowadays. There was a time when Blade was the only easy-to-use free mp3 encoder. I too encoded lots of albums with it in those days, not knowing/hearing what I know/hear now...

better would be to discontinue the website too

<sarcastic voice>

Ooooooh No more tonal purity

</sarcastic voice>

--
GCP

My favorite BladeEnc pitch (source unknown); "By looking at these spectrographs, you can see that Blade is actually compensating for it's own pre-echo at 320kbps, whereas LAME does not". Not sure that I buy into that one

At least the "Future Plans" section.
Quote: "I have great plans for this encoder and have thought up a lot of features I would like to implement."

Good riddance...

Let's mail the guy to get the site down or at least get rid of the b*s&t about tonal purity and all other crap about lossy mp3 compression... I already did.

Blah. Please let poor Tord alone. He already did a good job stopping working on Blade (and saying why, and pointing out quality is inferior to lame). That's more than I would expect.

Let the dead rest.

I wouldnt be so quick as to flame Blade. Yes, by today's standards its a pretty bad encoder but at the time it was at least interesting and was being used (which can be seen as a good or a bad thing). The only thing is that helped increase the popularity of mp3 and gave the public access to encoding.

Remember that this encoder is ages old!

It was a moderately good effort to improve on dist10 (speed wise) and you cant knock Tord for that.

I only used bladeenc once or twice because originally I used to use WinDAC to rip and xing to encode until I was lucky enough to get a copy of audioactive production studio (erm... wooo... hooo... :| ) - and finally move onto Lame + EAC.

Ruairi

Slashdot has a story about this, too. Some slashdotters state, that they're still using the best mp3encoder Blade...

dev0

Did you expect something else from them?

Folks,

please don't diss Tord. His work was extremely important for the whole mp3 scene, and it probably wouldn't be the same without BladeEnc. Heck, he came up with the DLL version first, allowing us to use mp3 encoding from various programs!

And I wonder how many would have stood up against threatening mails from FhG like Tord did.

With out him, without BladeEnc, there would be no RazorBlade, and there would be no RazorLame. I wonder what else wouldn't have happened with him being around.

Instead of sending him rude mails asking him to shut down his site completely, send him a mail thanking him for what he did. I will for sure.

I agree with rc55 and Dors. Tord doesn't need some kind of comments now. He did a valuable work some time ago.

Can't resist..[:diabolic:-mode] What else wouldn't have happened.. well, maybe P2Ps would have less bad quality 320kbps blade "tonal purity" transcodes. Maybe even more people would be using Lame and so many totally wrong myths wouldn't be around. [/:diabolic:-mode]

It's difficult to evaluate exactly, was blade more positive or more negative thing for the people using mp3. I don't think that blade was any groundbreaker. MP3 would have done just fine without blade also. Difficult to say...

Whoops, I sent I kinda "hate mail" to Tord telling him to improve blade & what was wrong with it (from the r3mix forum).

...this kind of considerations sounds stupid to me.

MP3 sucks (both in quality & licensing) and i think he taked the right decision.
>>> There's no valid reason to waste develop time for it. <<<

I hope he'll join Vorbis (has he said) instead.


Note: a Tord's reply is appreciated.

Yes, it is difficult to say. However, if i recall correctly, when I started looking for a free encoder over four years ago, only two where available for the Windows platform. At least, I only found two: BladeEnc, and some other which I have already forgotten the name of....

What I'm trying to say: I believe that BladeEnc was ground breaking, at least when it came to Freeware Windows encoders. It was Blade, semi-legally, or Xing, illegally. For me, the choice was simple.

But again, it's diffcult to say. Perhaps we should mail Paramount to make a time travel Enterprise episode on that topic...

Probably 8hz-MP3
Or SoloH...



Eeek! A Trekker!

Well I for one am going to keep the Blade Codec available for download, you might all laugh at it but there are occasions when people have a choice of no mp3s (Lame does not work for their computer / hardware mp3 player), in which case Blade steps in and they go away happy.

Thanks Tord Jansson for all your hard work, and 'up yours' to all the people are moaning about the warez mp3s they download and find are encoded at 128kbps with inferior encoders - go out and buy the CD and quit moaning.

Or plugger...

8HZ,Cannamp,Mpeg Suite,Plugger,SoloH,Xing-toMPG,Blade,First Lame...=Beginning interesting audio compressions=I Learn hearing and compare sound quality.

Thanks for it.... Freeware Develop-Heroes

PS: Blade is good for over 224kbps...

LAME should work on any computer that Blade should. I can't think of a single case where it wouldn't. If it doesn't, LAME isn't the problem, it's a stability issue with their computer. Also, it should be possible to make LAME work with any hardware player that Blade for some reason might but LAME by default wouldn't. There's lots of switches which might help, like --nores or --strictly-enforce-ISO (I think it's something like that), or by setting an upper limit in bitrate.

Really, I don't think this type of situation which is highly theoretically, extremely unlikely, and really a non-issue (LAME should work where Blade works, always).



Where the hell do you people get these ideas?

Yeah... HA isn't really about trying to improve the quality on all fronts of audio compression, or to provide useful information and to work against anything which stands in the way of all of this. You guys have figured it out. What it's really about is how we all just want people to rip their damn albums at higher quality so we can pirate them.. Yeah. Let me tell you... if only I could get the latest mtv band off winmx, or kazaa, or dc, or whatever the hell the latest l33t p2p network is, in aps instead of r3mix, or LAME instead of Blade... damn, I'd be sooooo happy.

Feh.

I find it highly ironic that you people would continue to make such flawed connections here. If anything, instead of reflecting on the HA community, it reflects on your own selfish-mindedness for even contemplating such possibilities in the first place. The fact that other people here have valid concerns and honestly care about the community and the quality of tools available, or the general state of knowledge, and that you guys would continue to try and tarnish those honest concerns and good intentions with such slanderous accusations is really pretty disgusting.

Makes me wonder why it's worth bothering with sometimes. You guys take so much of what you have for granted. If it wasn't for people that actually did care (because it's obvious that you don't.. if it's good enough for you, it's gotta be good enough for everyone, right?), you wouldn't have the quality tools available that you do now. Certainly with the attitude I'm seeing prevailing in the last couple threads on here lately, progress would never have been had. There would be no need for anything better because everything would always be "good enough" and the mere suggestions that something better should replace the non-optimal would be considered a fatal insult (seems it's almost to that point now). Gee, then we could all just sit there and stagnate.

I'm still conviced than Tord and Roel did something to help the community.

To slap in their face their errors wouldn't be fair, as they did fair good on other hand.

Besides, no one has the right to impose who is right and who is wrong, so the claims to shut down the r3mix and bladeenc webs is not fair.

There isn't even an agree of what human rights should be and what shouldn't...

...IMHO...

PS: I dare suggest, honestly, that this thread and the r3mix one be closed as they are scalating into flamewar

Heh. It's just that I don't feel like I owe any gratitude to Tord/Blade. I have never used Blade beyond testing, I see lots of misunderstandings and weird opinions in the net which have started from his "tonal purity", over-emphasizing the importance of ultra high frequency response and the unimportance of pre-echo-handling etc "information". These statements were never corrected, although I know Tord was contacted and informed about these many times.

Blade was never developed further although its flaws were pointed out many times, and many of the flaws would have been fixable, at least considering the time which it has been available:

Some of Blade's key-deficiencies which were pointed out long ago, but nothing ever happened:
-No lowpassing
-wrong transcient detection
-too late short block switching
-bad reservoir handling
-no joint stereo
-non optimal huffman compression
-lot of bugs everywhere
-wrong ath
-bad best quantization selection
-no scalefactor use
-no scfsi
-etc..

Blade competes with Xing-old and Qdesign MVP from the worst sounding MP3 encoder "prize" at lower bitrates, at high bitrates it's not near Lame. IMO it seems that Blade is still pretty close to ISO dist10 with some speed optimizations and some bug fixes here and there. I'd actually question whether it was so "hard work" eventually after all.

Tord is also the only developer I have ever seen who actually recommends a totally flawed testing method of psychoacoustic based encoders like he does at the bottom of his quality-page saying that:"Airwindows' Encoder Analysis and Visualisation is the most impressive technical test of encoder's I've ever seen. It even helped me understand a few things about BladeEnc that I only had a hint about and couldn't really explain in rational terms."
Frankly, makes me wonder did he ever really know what he was doing, or was he just speed-optimizing ISO dist10 source...

Somebody could say: better not to do it at all than do it badly... Or at least - tell truthfully how things really are...it's not that there wouldn't have been lots of proper info available for him.

Dibrom you shouldn't have taken what I said as an attack on yourself, or HA.

Put it this way - there is not one widely distrobuted audio program that comes with Blade as its default mp3 encoder, so why people have to hunt it off the net is beyond me.

Spoon,

Please, please, please, please, please remove Bladeenc! It's completely redundant now and pushing use of it is a /bad thing/. Really.

Lame can do ISO streams so that's not a problem. If there is any problem with portable players and such is has to be a shortcoming of the device. If any problem is found, I'm sure if you let the developers know they will sort it out.

Yes - Blade was interesting at the time but now ... it makes me sigh deeply to think people are still supporting it.

Ruairi

Yes, that was it's name!

I don't push it - it requires a certain amount of effort to install and is there for those who lame does not work, yes they could buy a new computer that works, but many people do not take audio anywhere that seriously.

Ok take this situation - guy installs Lame (default encoder) and it blue screens his computer (in about 1:150,000 people I would say this happens), he goes off looks and installs Blade - it defaults to 192KBps - he rips his mp3s - they sound very reasonable, he is happy...

Can somebody outline this 'tonal purity' bullshit for me? [img]af2dd8f698[/img]

Since when??

This would only happen because of hardware failure (eg too much overclocking, cheap Motherboard and/or RAM, etc). If a stable / beta LAME fails then I would say for sure that Blade would kick the bucket too...

Besides, what if people still read old codec analysis where Blade was praised for keeping the whole freq spectrum + the 'tonal purity' - and there are lots of these on the net... they'd choose Blade over LAME.

Perhaps you should be a little more careful about the accusations you make in the future.

Claiming that someone's genuine concerns and interests are nothing more than selfish and greedy desires to participate in illegal activity, certainly sounds like an attack to me.

They should sound very reasonable to anyone that doesn't have Golden Ears, artifact training and Sennheisers. (99+% of mankind, I would wildly guess)

Remember that there are lots of people satisfied with Xing at 128. For these people, Blade at 192 would be pure gold.

Whether it was hard work or not, Blade is a POS, plain and simple.
Damn, I really think he should take the website down (or at least remove all the bullcrap from the quality page).

i mailed him twice, argumenting every weak point of his page. He promised to update it, but it didn't happen for a long time now...

Hell, the general public are suckers for marketing. My girlfriend uses C90 tapes to tape the Bob Harris show off of BBC Radio 2 every weekend. Bring the white noise! hehe.

Remind me why we're here again?

I'm really disappointed.

Sincerly i can't understand this discussion !

>>> There's no more valid reasons to continue the MP3 development <<<

Why waste time for closed and patented codec ?




note for ruairi:



Ehm... provide her a pantium 75 with a Sb 16...

(and Radiator is even better !)

Because this codec is supported everywhere, and no other codec came even close so far.

Besides, MP3 isn't closed. Au contraire, it's very, very open and well documented.

A good example of closed codec would be WMA. Or VQF.

DTS is also highly closed.

I don't know *any* legal open source MP3 encoder. Do u ?

Indeed. Other examples: MLP, DSD (not really a codec, but not documented anyway), most lossless codecs, ATRAC, SDDS, QDesign, ePAC...

You are mixing everything.

For example: Music Jukebox uses LAME legally - JRiver pays royalty fees to FhG and Thomson.

Be Inc. used Blade legally bundled with the paid version of BeOS

So: It doesn't matters if it's open source or not. What defines legality is if the royalty fees are paid to the patent holders.

There are quite some closed source MP3 encoders for download that I really doubt are paying anything for FhG. (Some are even free, but packed with spyware)

These are usually compilations of dist10 code anyway...

>Claiming that someone's genuine concerns

It is one thing to have genuine concerns, it is another to go out and try and censor the world to fit in with your views, it is called being a dictator...


>even a tin can & string is an improvement

The usual spiel...I have encoded just a ramdomly picked track (first 60 seconds as I don't advocate music theft) to 192 Kbps Lame (direct from a APE):

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/beta/Basement%20...go%20(Lame).mp3

and to Blade also at 192Kbps:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/beta/Basement%20...o%20(Blade).mp3

Both about 1MB. Make your own decisions - BUT remember I am not advocating that you drop Lame, if you have a choice of no mp3s, I would wadger money on 99% of the population not knowing these two were different somehow. Piece of string and a can...my arse!

Ooh.. well, this is a sensitive bit, isn't it?

Someone once called me a messageboard Nazi... this seems along similar lines. I laughed at that, so I'll laugh at this

But seriously, if you think you're onto me with some sort of correlation between dictatorship, censorship, and my intentions, well.. you're seriously mistaken.

I think if you open your eyes, you'll find that HA is refreshingly free from censorship, unlike most other forums.

Also, there's a big difference between favoring the idea that sites with inaccurate information would cease to exist, and forcing them out of existance in a hostile manner.

Tell me, would you call an activist who is attempting to increase awareness and provide something truly better (measurable at least to a degree) for people, who only attempts to make their point known through knowledge and discussion, a dictator?

Rather, I say the situation is more or less reversed from what you are kind of getting here.

It seems to me that if you question pre-established notions, there must be something wrong with you. "How dare you say that these things may not be optimal, or that the time has come to retire them and move on, as better things have replaced them? Or how dare you say that maybe we should be doing things a different way, and that we should really do everything we can to make people aware of this? You should just sit down, shut up, and pay your respects to the pre-established notion here... you're out of line and such thoughts are dangerous."

I think the current situation is far more totalitarian and dictatorial than anything you're trying to correlate to my side.

Hmm, people should continue this in the off-topic forum if wanted. This thread is now closed..