I'm Just curios, do you remember the first encoder you used?

My first encoder was the internal Fhg codec used by Windows: this codec came with Windows Media Player and the maximum quality was "56kbps 24000 stereo".

I hope your first encoder was not Xing!

My first encoder was Xing, I think. But it made mp2 files, not mp3.

My first mp3 encoder was l3enc, I forget what version.

ff123

l3enc - I don't remeber what was the maximum bitrate but it sounded like crap. :-)

realaudio at 112kbps.
stop laughing.

Who's laughing?? I seem to think it was much the same for me too!!

This was the first mp3 encoder i used too. I was playing around with compression schemes like au or adpcm which are pretty bad. I was astonished how good a 56k mp3 (~1:24 compression) sounded in comparison to a 1:4 compression adpcm (or whatever it is called). At first it was pretty transparent to me. This was my very first mp3 experience

My first mp3 encoder was that version of the Fhg codec with the "fast" bit turned on (mp3compr09f.exe, if memory serves). At 128 kbps.

Then Xing, because it was fast.

Then Blade, because I heard that Xing sucked.

Then Lame, because it has VBR.

Now OggEnc, with Lame when I need an mp3.

I imagine that several of us who have been at this for more than a couple years used some things that would now be considered horrific.

Hehe, how silly!
I started with Blade (128kbps of course) four years ago, everybody knew that Blade gives perfect quality! :'( (w00t) >_<

My first was the Blade MP3 encoder. (oh the horror!...)

I belive I used MP3 Producer to encode CD's I had "ripped" with Cool Edit using the analog output from my ancient 4x CD-ROM, because it couldn't do digital. I encoded to 64 kbit mono, because my 486 100 Mhz didn't have the power to play back stereo files. I used MuseArc to play them back and I was unable to use my computer for other tasks meanwhile.

Also I would start as many sessions of MP3 Producer as there were tracks on the CD, and encode all files simultaneously. I would start encoding when I left for school, and if I was lucky, it would be finished once I got home.

Oh, the horror .

I had an 8 GB harddrive in my 486, which was crazy at the time. All the cool kids had K6 CPU's, but I 0wned them in harddrive capacity .

I first played with that old command-line one, l3enc I think. Made some 24kbps MP3. (I didn't know jack).

Later when I learned (sort-of) and started ripping my CDs I used Xing @ 128kbps. Still have that CD somewhere I think.

Not sure: L3Enc 2.61 @ 128 kbps or BladeEnc @ 128 kbps...

Blade @ 128kbps. But I was lucky that the very first file I encoded (a game soundtrack) caused horrible artifacts that I could hear without any experience, so I switched to LAME 3.70. (Took me a long time to figure out... I had no real clue what I was doing!)

After that I found MusicMatch and used it happily for over a year @ 128kbps , until I bumped into the r3mix.net forum. (July 2001 or something... )

I played around with MMJB (FHG fastenc) with on the fly encoding but my first few album encodes where L.A.M.E 3.88 with --r3mix.

What ever mp3 encoder that was included with MMJB 5.

Now I use lame, and oggenc (EAC to extract CDs).

Xing. hey, it was on the network... (ie the school network)

L3Enc V2.61 to encode.
WinPlay3 to decode.

All on my Pentium 133MHz Win '95 box.

Xing, 320 kbit stereo...

The first encoder I used was Xing MP3 encoder 1.5 (aka "Xing(new)") mostly at 192kbps , I got it from the infamous FOSI site in 1999.
I also used MMJB when it had the Xing internal codec but it was quite sluggish and unstable on my old Pentium 133MHz.Later I used MMJB with the buggy FhG codec , I think it was MMJB 4.
Never heard of LAME until I found Easy CD-DA Extractor ( www.poikosoft.com ) that used LAME 3.87 by that time.I wasn't into lossy audio compression at all until I got tired of the Xing sound at 128kbps :x that was almost the only thing I was getting from P2P.

BTW westgroveg , you got the wrong flag

My first encoder was a refference encoder that output MPEG1 Layer 1 audio. Can't remember exactly wat it was. This was back in the early 90s. Problem was there were not many programs to play them back and it took most of the system power to do so anyway. Next came some nameless CLI MPEG1 layer 2 encoder. About that time there was some decent playback software starting to show up. Aaaaah the good ole days of buggy pirate winamp 1 installs. Eventually I got ahold of a Xing MP3 encoder. It was a bit better than the CLI MPEG1 layer 2 encoder. But not much. Then l3enc. Then I detoured to gogo-nocoda I pulled off a japanese site. Found it was derived frome Lame. Then switched to Lame. Had a short stint with VQF. But ATM I use Lame, MPC, and Vorbis. That covers about the last decade.

L3enc, like many of us (probably)

l3enc.exe 2.61

But that was many many years ago. I just made some test encodes.
The first codec I used seriously was the Fraunhofer pro codec that followed DivX 3.11...

My very first rip/encode was made with Adaptec Easy
Cd Creator 3.x to wav. Soon upgraded to 4.x with can compress to mp3.(Blade??).
Rapidly switched to shareware version of Easy CD-DA Extractor(Lame), replaced by Cdex and finally EAC(Lame, of course).
Today I use EAC & Monkeys Audio mostly, but still keeping Lame or GoGo for mp3 creation.


LIF

Fall, 1996
In June 1996, I have gotten myself my first computer. An IBM Aptiva 150 MHz. Along the software package was a program for editing WAVE-files. I used analog recording to record from the 4x CD-drive.
Since I only had 1,6 GB of Harddrive space, I recorded in 22 KHz, Mono, 8-bit. I saved it in WAVE-format.

During 1997
A magazine named "Datatid" had some utilities on the included cd-rom. One of them was a tool called "l3enc.exe", which according to Datatid should be able to compress WAVE-files to 1:11 of original.
I didn't believe it, but urged to try as I pictured enormous posibilities.
I recorded (analogue) a song in 44 KHz, Stereo, 16-bit and saved it as a GIGANTIC wave-file.
Now I used l3enc.exe and after much trying and clicking, I managed to launch the encoder that could compress these wave-files. It took like an hour. Finally, the file was compressed. I was stunned, but at the same time very disappointed. It managed to compress my wave-file, but now it wasn't a wave-file any more , it was some stupid "mp3" file. I figured out I could use the other utility "l3dec.exe", when I needed to listen, but I didn't feel like decompressing the WAVE-file each and every time.
I let it rest, and continued to record my WAVE-files in 22 KHz, 8-bit, mono.

Late 1997
Now I got a hold of a demo of a program named "CD-streamer".
This one recorded a track, and then "CD-streamed" it into something called "real audio". I used it for some time, but then a milestone happened.
I talked to a guy I knew on an occation where we met, and told him about this "jukeboxing" I've been doing, and he told me he had a software that was capable of playing these compressed WAVE-files called ".mp3" without having to decompress each time. It was called WinAMP 1.4. He put it on a floppy and sended it to me.
I was gazed. What a wonderful application.

Later I got a new computer (K6 266 MHz), and I got internet access.
From the internet I got a program called WinDAC, and now I could - for the first time, rip a CD fast and digitally. I was stunned. Thanks to my new CPU, l3enc.exe wasn't as slow any more. And later I got the XING encoder what was faster than l3enc.exe. I begun upgrading harddrive, as I was ripping much music now. I ripped i 64 kbit, 44 KHz, Mono.

Sometime during 2000
I upgraded my harddrive to a 26 GB drive, and I made a new move. I now began ripping in stereo. 128 kbit!!
I also stumbled upon CoolPlayer by accident.
At first I didn't like it, and I left it alone, but after a month I went back to it, and ever since WinAMP has never been used.

May 2001
I upgraded my computer from K6-2 500 Mhz to Duron 750 MHz, and I stopped using WinDAC, because someone recommended me dBpowerAMP Music Converter.

May 2002
The worst thing ever happens. My harddrive gets nuked by an evil virus. All my rips are gone. It was terrible.
I got things re-installed, and went to download dBpowerAMP to rip some music, but then discovered something. The codec central now included some weird thing called "OGG Vorbis". Some months before, I went to update my CoolPlayer and noticed, when I use the open file feature, it now accepted these ".ogg" files, which I didn't care for at all. But since I like CoolPlayer, and how it's not bloated, I believed this OGG Vorbis thing might be something good, since the developers of CoolPlayer has begun to supported. Esspecially considering WMA and mp3PRO wasn't supported. I decided to download this OGG Vorbis and see what it was all about. I tested it at 64 kbit, 80 kbit, 96 kbit and 112 kbit. Since I had to re-rip all my music now, I would like to use it, if it's more compact than MP3 that is. I was stunned. I could not distinguish OGG Vorbis @ 80 kbit / Q1 from LAME 128 kbit. I decided to go with it.
Now I have ripped most of my music, and my total collection is 7 GB, while it was 11 GB before the virus, when it was stored in MP3.

Impressive recall MadiZone
I've got my first PC in '96 too , in August.My first audio experiments were with a software from SoundBlaster called "WaveStudio" , you could record and edit wavs with it.I used it to make my own windows sounds.
My first contact with MP3 was much later , I got internet access at the fall of '98 and downloaded some mp3 not even knowing what "mp3" was about.

Xing because it came with Audiograbber.

ahahaha yeah, the FOSI site.. those were the days.. *g*

started out using some stupid mp3 compressor program which actually created mp2 files..

My first was a Real Audio encoder. And my rips were all analogics (windows wav recorder) at that time

then I moved to blade, tried vqf for 3 weeks, wma 1 week, moved to the FhgRadium codec, tried mp3pro for 1 hour, then lame, tried ogg for 1 month, and now Im with mpc!

mp3 Producer Pro, before I found the light and started using Blade... >_<

Hahaha that's really a step backwards going from MP3 Producer Pro to Blade.
There is also a hacked version of MP3 Producer Pro 2 called "MP3 Compressor" I think.



That site is still online and rockin' although Xing MP3 Encoder is no longer there (thank God!).

Unfortunately it is still available on many underground sites...

All you people with your L3enc! I am starting to feal ancient!

I reckon the first I ever used was xing with AudioCatalyst v1.5
128kbit/s "dual stereo".
luckily I learned
Can you imagine people STILL use Audiocatalyst? it still flows around as warez (version v2.1). *shiver*

Radium Codec with CDex at 128 kbps (Joint Stereo) was my start into audiocoding.

I still have some old bootlegs encoded with it, becuase I can't find the tapes.

dev0

The first would be blade_enc.dll, I don't remember the version at all. Second "I think" it was lame_enc.dll v3.84, or v3.86 in CDex 1.30 Beta 1, or maybe it was Beta 2, I don't really remember which Beta it was, but nonetheless CDex introduced me to LAME.

Ditto here, L3enc (first MP3 encoder, anyway). I don't remember it sounding so hot either, but there was a time when 112kbps CBR was the default for just about everyone into MP3 (and it seems most were on IRC). Then it was 'revised' to 128kbps, and somehow (lord only knows) the idea is still around today.

I can top all responses so far.

Originally, back in say, around 1992, I couldnt afford a majorly big PC setup. No, I had a 48k ZX Spectrum. (See my avatar!, thats what it looks like when you turn the system on and load a screenshot, all be it speeded up about 50x!).

From an assembly listing, I had programmed in a sampling program which could do about 6 seconds of audio at a god awful bandwidth (2khz maybe?) - I had tweaked it so you could adjust the sample frequency to as low or as high (in theory) as you liked, so if you sampled too low it would sound simply like a series of beeps.

Also, to load the samples, it would take ages. Aaaages! About 5-6 minutes, and if I ran out of memory I ended up dumping it onto the screen ram bytes!

I also created a realtime visualisation program which sampled the tape input and displayed a waveform of sorts. After mucking around with sampling, I managed to make a sort of one-channel mod tracking thing where a sequence of extremely short samples could be played one after the other to form a crusty drum pattern. I did have a really cruddy sort of compression done via RLE and having a trigger point for silence to become a signal. I did a demo of sorts which had a SEGA logo (painstakingly done using binary) and played the "Sega!" sound, sampled from the Sega Master System.

But that was before the internet. I loved those days! I was only 10 or 11 at the time.

After that, waaay after when I got my first PC, I used to get .MOD files and wire up a hifi directly to the PC Speaker and in all fairness it sounded pretty cool. I did try twice to build a parallel port DAC (play audio via parallel port), but I found that they just plain didnt work - despite me seeing working examples. That didnt involve sampling or encoding but hey. Oh, yeah PKZip might have been involved .

My first soundcard was a Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum, so I got into doing analogue copies of cd tracks, sampled at 22khz, 4-bit ADPCM. I only had a 220Mb HD so quite often I'd zip them down and you could get a track on 7 HD disks iirc.

I was still playing with .MOD files at that point.

After that, I stumbled across mp3 and RealAudio at the same time. I used to use RA3 @ 80kbps (dual isdn) for storing tracks (I called it Tape Quality), and I was quite happy with playing with that for a while. After reading more and more about mp3, I downloaded l3enc, and started encoding 112kbps encodings (at the time I thought they were standard -- 1997), then moved onto mp3 compressor (a frontend for fhg encoder), then Radium @ 128, then Xing (I was recommended this, ignored the music quality because it was so fast... but I regret that badly now), after that I went to lame (--r3mix), then briefly (--alt-preset standard) however now I use MPC for all my archiving, until I get a huge hard drive when I will use FLAC and Ogg at -q 0 for remote streaming.

Phew!

Ruairi

Don't get me started on Mod files! I still have ton's lying around somewhere.

My first encoder was BladeEnc. I have first used it back in 1998. At that time I have encoded all my MP3s at 128 kbp/s. I can still remember how annoyed I was that "Kai Tracid - Planet Of Liquid Skies" (or whatever) sounded totally distored even with 256 kbp/s.

The first encoder I used was named mp3-compressor (propably this was just the name of the program that actually used another mp3 encoder?!)... Was quite shitty. Next were FHG's encoders inside various apps -> MMJB and such . Then came LAME, AAC (Psytel), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and finally Musepack. Today I use Musepack, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and LAME (depends on what I use the files for). The first album I wanted to compress* was Pennywise - Unknown Road; the encoding process lasted for some hours because the cpu was so slooow.

EDIT: *Of course the files were 128 Kbps CBR

I encoded over 300 songs in WMA 96kbps, but always wondered why it sounded like shit
compared to the 128kbps mp3s I had downloaded from Napster (he he, arrest me). Then I
discovered that the bitrate could go up to 160kbps, so I re-encoded almost everything
to 160kbps WMA. Later, I tried out MMJB for a while, making 192kbps stereo files. One day
I was this close to using AudioCatalyst. I downloaded it and was ready to give it a try
before stumbling over "Chris Myden's guide to making the best mp3s", which brought
LAME, EAC and HA.org to my attention.

Which mp3 codec is used in Microsofts Sound Recorder ???

Anyway, thats the one I used first

Well, I think it was CDex 1.3, LAME 128kbps(maybe1999, 2000...). It was just an experience. After that just used sometimes...
On 06-07/2002, I read about www.r3mix.net and started to encode using r3mix ("What is this --alt- presets??... forget, r3mix is good, it's ok.."). After ripping 3-4 CDs, finally arrived here in HA and learn about --alt-presets.
Now, LAME 3.90.3 aps -Y.

1999: Pirated Audiograbber, ripping to WAV, encoding the WAVs with pirated Audioactive Production Studio (Fraunhofer). 128 kbit, high quality, joint stereo. Damn, that is Deutsche Wertarbeit I thought when I listened to my first MP3s

Later on I discovered the Radium FhG Codec which became popular in my circle of friends (it had a very 1337 installation routine). I didn't change quality settings as I thought MP3 couldn't be better than 128 kbit and everything above is a big waste, as propaganda said. I never even tried higher. In the autumn of 2000 I got my first 56k modem and searched the web for MP3. Of course I stumbled upon Napster 'round that time... but that's another story. My setup changed quickly, I went from Audiograbber + Radium to CD 'n go Suite (?? some spanish freeware) + Lame, then I discovered CDex. Later on MP+ and I didn't use MP3 anymore. Finally EAC, since then I use EAC + Musepack. But as I'm more and more serious about killing Windows completely, I've moved to ye olde cdparanoia now.

First audio compression forums I read were mpex.net and r3mix.net, later HA.
First MP3 encode: I think it was Iron Maidens self-titled album.
First Musepack encode: From dusk till dawn OST, profile braindead

IMA ADPCM

Shame on u pirate! I will have to report this to the authorities!

I think it was audiocatylst but I also used MusicMatch Jukebox for awhile as well. I use dbPowerAMP for almost everything now. Recently started experiementing with lossless options besides MA - no way can I touch a lossy format for anything serious anymore.

I started out with ATRAC compression in 1994, using an MD deck. My first "real" encodings were done in 1996 or so on a Pentium 166 as 22.05Khz, 4-bit ADPCM. Then, I moved up to MPEG with some nasty software that uses straight dist-10 code.....can't remember the name, but it can encode Layers 1, 2 and 3 and it takes forever. From there, I briefly used VQF and Xing at 256kbps, dabbled for a while with --r3mix and then settled with MPC -q 5 or 6 for critical listening, -aps for portable.

iirc (and that is a problem...) it must have been in mid 1998 and I don't really know anymore which was my first encoder. But what I do remember is that shortly after I found out about 'AudioCatalyst' (that's Xing, right?). I got it from some suspicious site and was totally amazed at the speed it was encoding at. I used it to do quite an amount of rips just because it was so fast, with normalization and all. Beginner's mistakes...

Nowadays I certainly only use gogo.

Nah, j/k!

Audio Catalyst is Xing software; I paid (I think) $30 for the boxed set (Version 2 or 3 maybe) with the encoder and equally crappy MP3 player and "editor" that I first started with.

Yup. Its fast......

Then, WMA V8 at 96 kbps, quite fast

Then, Poikosoft Easy CDDA, too slow

Then, MMJB 7 fastenc 128 kbps, very very fast

HOW SILLY I AM,
now using ogggt2, ogggt3, mppenc