Hi,

I tested today all my MP3 Albums with the Tool Encpsot. I was surprised as I saw that some Albums were encoded with Blade, FhG and Xing, so I would like to know if the Codec Encspot found out is right?

2. FhG: What's that? Behind FhG is (fastenc or mp3enc). Is that the Frauenhofer Codec? Is the audio quality of this codec ok?

Greets

Yes it's the Fraunhofer codec. mp3enc is the good one. The audio quality it very ok.
About Encspot, dunno...

Encspot is not always correct. Some of my files were reported with Blade but I had definitely encoded them with Plugger (3 years ago ). If it reports LAME 3.9x however, you can assume it is correct since most mp3s encoded with LAME IMO have the version stored in the Lame-tag.

Encspot is very likely to be exact.

I have personally experienced some problems with encspot. I had some FhG-files which encspot told me was Gogo-files... But it doesn't happen very often. It's mostly pretty exact.

If you want to analize a special mp3 do a full scan! Sometimes he finds an other encoder.
But the quality-rating is not very good, a shine-mp3 at 256KBit/s for testing had terrible artifacts (even xing is better!) and encspot rated the quality as good (green). Also encspot don´t know some encoders like uzura3.
If you want to know if an mp3 sounds good, listen to it, if you think it´s ok for you, don´t care what encspot says.

The other thing about encspot is that it can tell you nothing about the quality of the original rip.

Transcoded files are not overly common, but they are out there. Some rips are radio rips, or processed vinyl wavs. Some that are ripped from cd have pops and garbage from poor or absent jitter correction.

But I use encspot all the time as a guideline. It is generally extremely accurate in detecting xing crap d/t the short block problem. It seems to be pretty good with blade as well, and really, for me anyway, these are the two most objectionable codecs out there.

You should consider listening to everything once, but if encspot indicates poor or questionable quality, I would download other files for comparison or listen very carefully for artifact.

Ok, thanks for answers. But complete Scan didn't change only one file's encoder.

@kennedy: Thats correct, but if you download a retail album at a site you needn't be afraid about this

Some Albums were encoded with XIng, I immediately deleted them *g*

Some MP3s have bad last frames, what does that mean?

Greets

Just that the file is not completed, missing frames at the end. Could happen becasue of a disconnect during the dowload. I can't imagine another possability why a file should have missing frames at the end (altough there might be theoretical ones like an error during the encoding process or file corruption because of the famous VIA bug).

Hi,

Disconnects at the Download aren't possible, because there are only 3 albums which have errors and all the files of these 3 albums have errors

Is it possibleto correct these errors?

If you are sure that no noticable audio data is missing... yeah
I usually use mp3trim for that.
The free version has a pretty annoying restriction, though. It only works with files up to a certain filesize, but usually it's enough (it should accept files with up to 7 minutes play time).
If some noticable audio data is missing you could use the same tool to fade out the song.
Not a perfect solution, but hey, better than nothing!

OK, Thx 4 the Info.

Now I still have some Questions about some MP3 Codecs and its quality:

1. Blade: Really Bad right?

2. Xing Old / Xing New: The Differences between the 2 codecs / Quality=Bad?

3. GoGo 3.0 : Shall be a Lame-Codec? How is the quality?

4. Encspot shown 2 differnt fHg Encoders: ACM or Producer Pro and fastenc/mp3enc. What is better?

5. How is the quality of Frauenhofer Codec? Is is nearly Lame or much worse?

Greets

All BAD but GoGo which is actually lame, i say don't use it, use LAME, and Fraunhofer. The Frauenhofer encoder is very good. It is near to LAME's quality, and better than LAME for low birtrates (like 96kbps and below).
ACM codec indicates that the file is either encoded by the old Frauenhofer ACM codec from 1996 or by the ACM codec created/hacked by Radium of FhG's internall codec from 1998. Fastenc is bad, mp3enc is good.

Hey, THX for the fast answer

Well, I still have one answer *g*

One of my albums is called to be encoded with "lame dll". But it's no difference in quality if an mp3 is encoded by lame.exe or lame.dll is it?

And I can't find out which lame.dll version was used?

Greets

Hmm well that i don't know, but i'm sure that the quality of the dll is no different than of the exe. (if both are the same version of course)

... IF the settings that have been used for the encoding and the *.exe is made from the same source as the *.dll THEN there is no difference regarding the quality

The problem is that most of the people who know how to create the best quality mp3's (EAC or maybe CDex + LAME with the --alt-presets) wouldn't use the dll usually, although the --alt-presets are included in the dll these days. If someones uses the dll for encoding (the main reason might be the possibility to encode on-the-fly >_< ) you could assume he doesn't know too much about all the problems that could occur during the Ripping/Encoding process.
Things like pops/clicks because of badly scratched CD's, when the encoder has to wait for more input data ...etc ...

An Encode made with dll might be created by someone who doesn't know too much about Ripping/Encoding, so i would rather stay away from that, but that's just my 0.02$

I don't get all this hatred towards on-the-fly encoding.

I did a test once: EAC, a very badly scratched CD (one spot took several minutes to read), lame_enc.dll and lame.exe.

I created an MP3 directly from the ripper, with the DLL, and another one with an intermediate .WAV file, later compressed with LAME. I used VBR -q 5 at the time, IIRC. (Since you can't (?) select --aps from the DLL dialog)

Both files were bit-identical.

Does anyone know whether any new versions of EncSpot are released or not? Is this program still being updated?