I have a few albums encoded with the mp3 encoder that was included with DivX 3.11 alpha. It identified itself as Fraunhofer Professional. Is this the official Fraunhofer encoder in a pirated version? Is it an old version that sounds much worse than a new Fraunhofer encoder?

The reason I ask, is because the 256 kbit CBR files sound horrible. And the 320 kbit CBR files are not transparrent.

It's a pirated version of the official. By Radium, a dead "3LiT3" "audiowarez" group. It's not a very old version (like the one from 1996). It's the one from 1998 if i remember correctly. Ignoramous (the cracker) made two versions of the codec, the first one is just like the second one (edited: not quite right actually), only the second one supports changing stereo, joint stereo, blabla. Useless.

I loved Radium! If it wasn't for them, I probably wouldn't be mucking around on this discussion board

The encoder you're talking about is the one mentioned on ff123's site, Fraunhofer v1.2 b63i, with the Joint-stereo bug that started all that anti joint-stereo paranoia (or maybe the paranoia was Xing's fault... everything's Xing's fault).

Yeah.. They did a REALLY bad thing releasing that second version of the hacked ACM codec (they just didn't know it then ).. Man, Radium's FhG MP3 codec/s are probably the most popular cracked software in the world! Think about it..
Anyway, Radium's first version of the ACM codec (v1.063) didn't have that bug if i remember correctly.

One other odd thing with Radiums hack, is that the time of the resulting mp3 does not correspond to the original wave file. At least, that's what happend on my machine.

Heh.. I thought that was a problem with FhG's codec, not just Radium's hacked version. hmm..