Fraunhofer just released a command line mp3 encoder. I tried it and found it to encode 5x faster than my LAME encoder. it also supports mono, stereo and surround (1,2 and 6 channels). its available for Win32/64 Linux32/64 and MacOSX.

http://www.all4mp3.com/tools/sw_fhg_cl.html

Hmm... That pretty interesting news. I still don't think the Fraunhofer mp3 encoder compares to the VBR capabilities of Lame. But it is still nice to see Faunhofer trying to improve their bad mp3 encoder, God knows they need to improve the quality of their encoder.

Interesting... It's really fast (about 40x here - AMD 1800+). Has some limitations though; lowest bitrate for stereo is 96kbps, no vbr, doesn't handle pipes. Maybe I try some quality tests against Lame CBR/VBR...

I think it's the first "mp3 surround" encoder... Would be interesting to see how it perfoms on multichannel files - maybe against multichannel AAC