I've searched and found some info on the GoGo encoder, but I've not really been able to find a defintive answer as to what the quality differences are between GoGo and Lame.

Could someone explain why GoGo is considered "bad" , or point me in the right direction to find out more... my search skills leave a lot to be desired

Gogo does not use the high-quality preset tunings of the current Lame versions (see Lame changelog for details), and it still uses the outdated "gpsycho" psychoaccoustic model instead of the newer "nspsytune". If quality is your concern, by all means use Lame. That said, Gogo quality is far from bad; it just isn't as good as Lame
Maybe this is also of interest to you:
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/mp3-128/presentation.html
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/mp3-128/results.html

Greetings, sTisTi

Hiya. Sorry to bump this post up, but i didn't want to start a new topic in the fear it has been asked before (although i couldn't find it using search.)

My question is thus. I have ripped a few cd's using Lame 3.96, and when i run them through encspot basic (the latest i assume as i just downloaded it from their site yesterday) it says some tracks were ripped using "gogo (after 3.0)"



Have i done something wrong here?

What does Mr. Questionman say?

Not sure now why that says all but one was ripped using 3.96.

As far as I can remember, encspot used to guess "gogo" when someone try to scan uncomplete lame encodings (by uncomplete, I mean unfinished encodings, not unfinished download: just try to scan a folder when lame is running, the 'active' mp3 will be marked as 'gogo' then as 'lame' when the encoding ends).
There's maybe something missing in some of your files (lame tags maybe?) that mislead encspot to error.

I'm going to assume it was an erronous rip and redo it. the properties page of dbPoweramp says that the track "an owl" has a length of 0.

I don't get it though, they are tagged properly and sound perfectly fine.

make sure not to run your files through some software that claims to be able to 'fix' mp3 errors or cleans out all the 'redundant data' . Also, have EncSpot scan all frames of your files.

A little off-topic, but I shall mention something funny that happened to me once.

I was looking through a directory of MP3's in EncSpot and it told me one of them was encoded by "Lame 3.9A".

It was one I made myself, so as far as I can tell it was just a one-in-a-million chance that of all places for corruption to appear, it appeared only in the Lame header of that file.

A quick hex edit restored the value to "Lame 3.90", naturally.

I have 6000+ mp3's. That would take forever (even if all the app had to do was scan for errors let alone fix them ) After this incident i'd be far too scared to find out the results

GoGo came out of a university research project to take a lame version and optimise the existing code as far as possible for the x86 architecture and to make use of vectorisation to SIMD units and parallelisation for SMP.

As such it can only ever be as good as the lame version it was based on. Even the latest GoGo builds are based on pretty ancient versions of lame, 3.88 according to the readme file in the source code for GoGo although the webpage claims 3.9x