I know the author has stopped development of bladeenc but it's still available on the net since not all countries have accepted software patents.
And how does it compare to LAME at CBR?

It's weak. Use Lame.

http://www.rjamorim.com/test/128extension/results.html

I recall a post where garf or gabriel neatly summed up all the things Blade did horribly wrong. It wasn't a short list.

Blade's author left up a message recommending everyone to switch to Vorbis. I think you should, but who am i?

Lame has the same legal status as Blade has, doesn't it?

one word: obsolete

IMO BladeEnc is one of the worst MP3 encoders (at least among widely known encoders). At 128kbps you can usually hear tons of artifacts, unlistenable even if you´re not an audiophile. It is understandable because it´s quite old, developed mostly by just one man and doesn´t implement many technologies used in LAME.

>still available on the net since not all countries have accepted software patents

The mp3 patents are not software patents, but method patents which are valid in pretty much the whole world.

Why digging up such an old and obsolete encoder when LAME is free and thoroughly tested?

Like everyone has said, BladeEnc is obsolete.
Now let us concentrate on using LAME...

@DARcode
He probably just wanna know its status as of now.
He probably have read or heard about it somewhere and has no idea what kind of an MP3 encoder it is.

You can't tell someone on what to ask on this regard, imho. =)

Kind of a minor quibble... Until very recently, all software patents were "method" patents. It's safer that way. For example, if you do a patent search, only 100 out of Microsoft's 4000+ patents have the word "software" in the title.

If you look at some of FhG's patents, all the meat is described in math. Personally I'm kind of split on the issue. This is applied math just like a laser is applied physics. But it's much harder to draw a line on inventions where there is no physical device. In the realm of math / software patents, I think of patents like these as the last hard ground before you step into the quicksand. After that it becomes very ambigious, a murky border with no clear transition... But very soon you are being sucked down underneath a flood of junk like the Creative DAP patent. Or, god help us, "business methods" patents.

blade sounds evil, hehehe. lame 128 beats blade 256 to my ears. the blade 128 is OMG!!! sounds garbled as hell. of course the last time i used it was 1999 so it might have improved with later versions, who knows

Sound quality of Blade never changed, as the output has always be bit identical to the ISO demonstration code.

I regret that this encoder was ever compiled and distributed.

There was a myth once that it ruled at 256 ( probably started at slash dot or some equivalent learning source), and it does sound OK at this rate for most stuff.

But at 128 it's terrible,and the peer to peer networks are still flooded with these files for classic rock tracks.

It just contributes to the rumour that "mp3 sucks" but it is not representative at all.

I remember trying to encode Metallica's "Blackened" with it at CBR 160, and hearing a phenomenally objectionable artifact on the opening guitar. So I reencode from wav at 192. It's still there. I reencode to 256. Still there...

Now, now... Blade is indeed crap these days, but it had its merits when it was released.



Started at Usenet, more likely. And reverberated at underground music swapping groups (the "scene").

Like I said, Its EEEEEVIIIL!!! 128 LAME outperforms 256 Blade. ahhh pathetic. can't believe people actually used it a lot before

I personally encoded all my music with blade around '96.. Was lame even existent then? Apart from having a very low lowpass, I don't see any MAJOR issue with blade -- it's perfectly listenable at 192 for a portable cd/mp3 player, albeit a little high bitrate to be "listenable" (may some say barely?) -- it was also one of the fastest encoders, back then.. beating even GoGo, IIRC...

(of course, since then, i've been on lame 3.97.. but that was my hard transition : blade 192 to lame 3.97a2/3 -v3 --vbr-new; lame 3.97a7 -v2 --vbr-new

sidenote : should i reencode; have any major changes been made since 3.97a7 (vs 3.97b1) to the -V2 --vbr-new mode?

Using Blade makes baby Jesus cry! It's so bad at 128kbps that it's been known to pop breast implants and make airplaines fall from the sky. Brittney is still transparent, though

Anybody remember that old BS about Blade @ 320kbps being more "tonal" than LAME and "correcting it's own pre-echo?" Those were such innocent times.....

Tried a couple of samples for fun:

fatboy @ 128
castanets @ 128

Granted, these are difficult samples, but they sound so bad it's almost unrecognizable

I agree, Blade was at least a choice back then, there weren´t many free MP3 encoders. Not to mention other formats...
I remember the "tonal purity" (or something similar) some people said BladeEnc has. No one ever presented any evidence.

As kennedyb4 said, the fact that p2p networks are flooded with 128kbps blade, xing and similar encodings is a waste. Imagine if all that music were encoded with Vorbis aoTuV b4 -q4. Or even plain Vorbis I -q4.
For those depending on MP3-only hardware, maybe re-encoding aoTuV -q4 with latest LAME could sound better than directly encoded with Blade or Xing at 128.
(just wondering, no real evidence).

Many people is still using Xing (and some people even Blade).

There is not even evidence to present. "Tonal purity" is just a meaningless buzzword. It's just like claiming the sound is "warmer".

I am pretty sure that those people were reading spectograms rather than doing a proper listening test.

well, Xing is not that bad.
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/mp3-128/plot12z.png

spectrograms are pretty

The old Xing, the one that was really fast, was bad though.

Wasn't Helix based on Xing also?