Which have the best sound quality? I know, mp3s have bad soundquality, but which plugins should I choose? Thanks!

To my knowledge, no statistically significant audible differences have been proven.

I use the Fraunhofer mp3 decoder. It also handles MP3PRO, and yes I have encountered a few.

http://www.mp3prozone.com/download_winamp.htm

I do not use an MP3 output plugin. LAME command does it for me.

Oh, really? To my ears, LAME is quite transparent.

Oh God, please don't use that plugin!
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?th...d=161361#mp3pro

Ouch!

I didn't see any mention that it does not decode properly. Tags, titles, meta data are not terribly important to me. I do have a genuine need for MP3PRO. Public radio station KUSF (San Francisco) streams MP3PRO.

That being said, I would definitely consider alternative plugins or players for MP3PRO streams.

Woody

That seems to be a generalization often sprouted without much evidence these days. I think it stems from the fact that mp3 is quite non-competitive in the very low bitrate area (like bit rates targeted to mobile phones or low quality portables for example). In the 128k and over bit rate that most people here are targeting mp3 is still very competitive.

See http://www.rjamorim.com/test/multiformat128/results.html for example.

Sorry, but I asked for plugins for playing mp3 not mp3pro...

Which part you didn't understand?

The question which plug-in to choose is nowadays answered dependant on the amount of features you're interested in, not the decoding quality, as already stated above. The built-in Nullsoft decoder offers a good amount of features, though it lacks support for APEv2 tags. If your MP3 collection was partially tagged with this format, then the MAD plug-in is really a good choice. I've been using MAD for a few months now and I'm quite content with it. Especially its advanced file properties dialog is useful to me because it displays the exact format of ID3v2 tags (ISO/UTF) and all custom entries of APEv2. MAD also allows to choose between ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4 as default tagging scheme, which is very important for compatibility reasons.

There's also Otachan's in_!mpg123, though I don't know much 'bout its current state. I had tested an older version some time back, but not for long since it opened Windows Explorer when checking a file's properties, which is quite useless for ID3v2.4 and APEv2 tagged MP3s.

Hi hariskar. When encoding (wav -> mp3) there are many different choices that the encoder can make that will impact on the quality of the resulting mp3. In other words encoding is a one to many (potential outcomes) process. Decoding or playback (mp3 -> wav) on the other hand is basically a one to one process. That is, equalizers and other "enhancments" aside, all players should produce the same output and if they don't then they are broken. So all non-broken output plugins are essentually equivalent in terms of sound output. So the things you should be looking at are things like tag support, cpu usage etc, but not sound quality.

Thank you. So, if I want to play my mp3s I have downloaded all those years, it the sound quality is the same if I use MAD plugin, mpg123, or nullsoft's plugin... Then I leave the default nullsoft plugin.

Personally, I prefer the MAD decoder set to render in 24bits with Gaussian noise shaping, going via S/PDIF into my Denon AVR 1802 ... but that's a matter of taste, I guess.

Cheers,
Maggi

edit:

I forgot to mention, that all my MP3s are ripped with EAC (incl. AccurateRip) and encoded with LAME in highest quality VBR joint-stereo and using Replay Gain in album mode



Maggi

<rant deleted>

I'm currently using the updated in_mad plugin with 24bits, gaussian, replaygain, etc enabled. For output, using Otachan's out_asio

Just wondering, has anyone been able to ABX the difference between mp3 @ 16 bit and mp3 “rendered in 24bits with Gaussian noise shaping” ?

never heard about it, i'm pretty interested if it improves audio quality in any way, may somebody enlighten me ?

A better question would be, "Has anyone been able to ABX the difference between 16 and 24 bits, period?".