Check out this link, the change log looks quite impressive.

- ID3V1.1 read tagging support for Winamp2, XMPlay and XMMS plug-ins

Ummmm, time to switch to APEv2 for tagging format.

Ghido wrote:


What's new
==========

This is beta version, it passed extensive successful testing on around
26GB of audio data and it uses only mathematically proven to be correct
algorithms. The base 4.5x file format is now frozen.

OptimFROG 4.504b [2003.04.16] has the following (new) features:

- Win32 and Linux versions
- extensible, streamable compressed format
- bitstream error resilience and transparent real-time recovery
- faster seek with intelligent caching for plug-ins
- backward compatible with version 4.2x (decode only)
- Winamp2, XMPlay and XMMS input plug-ins
- 64 bits large file support under Win32
- enhanced compression and speed compared to version 4.5alpha
- optimize mode, further improving compression at no decoding cost
- ultra, insane, extranew and bestnew compression modes
- optimal support for ALL integer PCM wave formats up to 32 bits
- full pipe processing
- multiple file processing
- full raw file support
- ID3V1.1 read tagging support for Winamp2, XMPlay and XMMS plug-ins
- quick verify integrity
- compatible with Exact Audio Copy V0.9 beta 4, with ID3V1.1 tagging
- extensible command line format

Not yet released, but will be available soon:
- foobar2000, Winamp3 and dBpowerAMP input plug-ins
- automatic speed calculation for all encoding and decoding modes
- recovery information at creation and repair for corrupted files
- store MD5 hash for raw audio data
- uLaw, ALaw and IEEE float data types support
- multichannel support
- Replay Gain support
----------------------------------------------------------------

With all the features that should be available soon, APEv2 tagging must be peanuts

Here is how version 4.504b compares with 4.50a here, using the "Platina" pop compilation album. Going through all test-albums will take several days, but this album proved to give quite average results with all the different lossless compressors. Apart from the compression mode, all switches were left in default.

- Filesizes with the existing modes (fast, normal, high, extra, best and ultra) remained practically unchanged (within a few bytes).
- Decompression speed did not change.
- Compression was a little faster, as promised in the changelog (fast & normal 12%, high 9%, extra 6%).
- The new mode extranew compressed to 63.24%, 0.5% better than ultra (63.75%), while still being a bit faster.
- The new mode bestnew compressed to 62.99%, 0.25% better than extranew. But it's almost twice as slow. Like the existing insane mode, much too slow for 'realtime' on my PC.

So the ultra and insane modes appear obsolete, if extranew and bestnew consistently come out better like this.
In comparison, La 0.4 high gets to 62,69%, and is about twice as fast as extranew...

Edit: tiny typo

Webpage (under the www button below) updated with this OptimFROG release, and also added Bonk (in lossless mode of course).

Thank you for the update.

It should be noted though, that it is a slight speed disadvantage for OptimFROG (which can use the SSE extensions for the extranew and bestnew modes) to run on a non SSE machine

Also, OptimFROG has Winamp2, Winamp3, XMPlay and foobar2000 (both 0.586 and 0.6) input plug-ins :-)

Yes, I read and updated about the fb2k plugin already after reading your other post!

The average improvement of extranew over ultra, with all 7 albums, was 0.64%. That's quite much, any reason you kept the ultra and insane modes nevertheless, or will they be removed if all stays well while in beta?

ghido:

>- foobar2000, Winamp3 and dBpowerAMP input plug-ins

Are you writing the dBpowerAMP Plug in?, if so can I be of assistance.

> Are you writing the dBpowerAMP Plug in?, if so can I be of assistance.
Yes, I studied the dbpoweramp-input-decoder.zip and I think it's very clean (and clear) :-).
It should be ready later today. Thanks for the offer. I'll let you know if I need any assistance...