hey guys,

just a question for the future where I'm very interested in:

after 3.98 final is out, what do you developers do next? I think the 3.9x series are very very developed now differences are marginal, except 3.98 will be more optimized for all users...

but will you try to develope 3.99 ? Wouldn't it be more useful to make 3.98 final the standard for a longer time then and start development on the lame 4 series?

thx for replies you good ones

I have an additional, somewhat related question: just how "new" will LAME 4 be?

Judging by the replies in this topic it will be an entirely new encoder, written from scratch.

But what about the established features like the psychoacoustic and VBR models, the numerous tunings (i.e. the presets), etc.? Surely some of these are too good to scrap altogether.

Lame 4 won't take the place of the 3.9x branch for a long time, i think. They will both exist as competitive encoders, and there will be certain situations where 3.9x will be better than 4.x and vice versa.

So i thing there's even place for a 3.100, 3.101 and so

don't you think the potential of lame 3.9x is being exhausted?

There's always more that can be done.

I was just gonna say that, I mean if 3.98 is alpha 10 now, doesn't it still have a beta stage to go through?

3.100 looks like 3.1 which is hella old They should rather name it something like 3.99.001

Tell that to MAME. They're up to .111 now.