Hi!

I use Lame 3.90.2 and EAC on my Duron 1ghz system.

A friend of mine has bought a portable mp3-player and now wants to encode his albums to listen to them with his new player.


But on his machine, a P 200, Lame aps is VERY slow.
He doesn't want to archive his songs, and so, quality doesn't matter.

Can someone tell me what is the fastest mp3-enc? he wants bitrates like 128kbit/s.

BTW, the encoder should be freeware

Did he already try --alt-preset fast standard ?


edit: There is a lot of speed in LAME outside the presets.
Look into --vbr-new and maybe something like -V 4 ---lowpass 16 but it will still be larger than 128 and nowhere nearly as good as --aps.

Try --alt-preset 128. If that's too slow, try gogo. Gogo is much faster still, but I'm not sure what the quality will be like.

try gogo. it's bases upon lame 3.88, but optimized for speed. avg. speed on my xp 1800+ with def. 128kbps setting is ~40x.

http://mitiok.free.fr/gogo310.zip

commline encoder and dll included.

regards; ilikedirt

Has your friend tried --alt-preset 128? which would produce abr 128 files at a speed much better than aps as well as being more suited to your friend's needs. If that is too slow, then you could try using the command line:

--abr 128 -h -m j -lowpass 16

If that still encodes too slow but is still more than enough for your friend, remove the -h and you should see greatly improved speeds. (with less quality)

As for your question, Xing is the fastest MP3 encoder around, too bad it's the crappiest around and is not free. For speed you could always try the GoGo MP3 encoder from here which is based Lame 3.88 and quality-wise is much better than what Xing could ever be.

edit: ahh I've been beaten!!

Thanks!


but which command line should he use with gogo? 128kbit/s are surely enough for him.

This one works OK, but you may want to play and see:

gogo -b 128 -m j -q 4 input.wav

Just typing 'gogo' at the command prompt lists the options.

well, thank you!

it's very fast, and the quality is really enough

Another satisfied customer
But who's running a book on if he'll return?

At Roberto's or John33's page, you can get the newer GoGo 3.10 pl4 compilation.
The Mitiok's compile is older than that.
And dont forget to download the great frontend for it, by Speek(Wav2GoGo).

LIF

Hi THE_NOXIER

For speed [and very good quality @128 kbps] I recommend FastEnc, a free encoder that clocked 3.2-3.5x on my old Pentium 233.

FastEnc is from FhG, the makers of MP3Enc and L3Enc. It is highly tuned for lower bitrates and produces, IMO, much higher quality MP3s than LAME at 128 kbps. Flanging and other artifacts are very minimal. It integrates well with EAC too.

You can download FastEnc here [193 KB].

Suggested commandline parameters for your friend:

-br 128000

Hope this helps,
CD

Compact Dick:

That FastEnc version you linked to has the stereo collapse bug, which means files encoded by it sound nearly like mono. Check out ff123's site for details.

Unless you use the high quality mode (which is slooooooow), this encoder will give you extremely crappy quality.


I'm guessing that Gogo @ 128 sounds like LAME @ 128 with GPSYCHO (or worse)? In that case, I would too recommend FastEnc, but the intact version, as included in MusicMatch Jukebox. It produces less ringing than the standard LAME 128kbps mode, and sounds clearer. It doesn't beat LAME "--alt-preset cbr 128" though IMHO.

Uhm, he was looking for a command line encoder... oh well.

Have you guys read the question?, “Fastest MP3-commandline encoder”, that would be gogo, Xing is very fast but not freeware. For high quality, high speed the new lame 3.93 is the best option but also not what you asked for.

If I remember correctly, the last version of FastEnc used in EasyMp3 and the more recent MusicMatch doesn't contain that bug. I recently bought a portable mp3-player with a 64 mb built-in memory and I use Easymp3 (VBR, fast) to encode my tunes for optimal size-quality ratio (around 140 kbps). they sound pretty darn good. They actually (in my opinion) sound better than those encoded with Lame 3.92 --alt-preset 140. What do you guys think?

I have yet to try Lame 3.94 a2 with the new "dm radio" preset. I wonder how that will turn out...?

Hi Volcano

I though version 1.02 had cured this problem. In fact, I couldn't make out anything wrong with the stereo separation @ 128 kbps, fast mode Not that I have golden ears but I have trained them well...

I did try out MusicMatch 7.2's encoding, and while CBR was good, the VBR left a lot to be desired. Test the intro guitar riff from Poison's "Talk Dirty To Me" - there's lots of warbling and flanging @ VBR 50% and 60%.

Thanks for the feedback

Edit: Changed quote date and time to ISO 8601 format.

I would tell a friend to use fastenc too if he was shooting for 128.

Some of gogo's optimizations affect quality significantly and at 128, there is not much room for error.

Your conclusion is drawn with incomplete information. The GoGo encoder optimizes by removing large chunks of the psychoaccoustic model from LAME. My guess would be that your conclusion is premature. Who knows if Xing uses a psychoaccoustic model? Maybe they do, maybe they don't. But we can be certain that GoGo doesn't, and that LAME does. So to say that GoGo is superior to Xing merely because its pedigree is LAME, is illogical.

Using fastencc.exe from the link given above, and using mc_sich_short.wav as the test sample and -br 128000, the loss of stereo separation was obvious.

ff123

I thought Gogo used the psymodel by default, and you had to use the -nopsy switch to deactivate it. At least, that's what the commandline options imply.

By the way (this is directed to the original poster), if you take john33's commandline (gogo -b 128 -m j -q 4 input.wav) and add a "-a" in there, you get abr encoding, which will most likely improve quality a bit.