ok, so it seems I'll be opening this forum then

I'm looking for the fastest, best and easiest to use MP3-encoder...any hints?

ONE

use EAC in combination with lame encoder

Easiest: probably Audiograbber or AudioCatalyst (Audiograbber can use Lame encoder plugin)

Best: LAME encoder plugin, in combination with Exact Audio Copy (EAC)

Fastest: have no idea, if you set low compression, I guess anything can be fast. A fast CPU can do the trick too.

Personally I use EAC with LAME encoder, it is free and as far as I know the best quality available at this moment.

thanks for your replies so far...

I used to work with Xing Mpeg Encoder...really fast and decent quality...but since they got taken over by Real Media I cant seem to find a ~free~ version higher than ehm 1.0

too bad, really liked that encoder

ONE

Xing - From EVERYTHING I ever heard about that encoder it was meant to be pretty bad quality.

Stick to EAC and LAME. Who cares about the fastest. The mp3 is going to last years. Spend a few extra seconds making sure that those years are filled with sweet sounding music.

Make sure you either encode it at 192 or you use a good VBR setting.

I must agree with Nila.
Xing seems to be pretty unefficient.
EncSpot generally displayes "BAD" or "NOT BAD" quality if I scan mp3s encoded with Xing.
The *FASTEST* mp3 encoder with the best quality compared to its speed is fastenc from FHT.

It is used by the Cool Edit PlugIn mp3me (fht.flt), for example.
Another good prog is the mp3producer Pro from Opticom. But it doesn't support VBR, I think.

BTW: If you're interested to also DECODE your files the BEST way, then take a look @ http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~djmro...ers/intro.html

happy encoding ;-)

I stick to the good old frauenhofer
i'm verry pleased with the quality, even for classical music.
Never used xing after I encoded The second symphony by borodin, it sounded awful
I didn't test the new lame.

I use a prog called cdex, easy to use and very good quality rips.
It uses a version of lame encoder supplied when you download it.
www.cdex.n3.com

There are lot's of Fast & Easy MP3 encoders...But when there's Exact Audio Copy & Lame , why bother ? It's nice...go get ya some !

I would go for CDex with LAME encoder... CDex is quite Easier for first time users. And of course CDex is freeware like EAC

Actually, best quality encoder depends on what bitrate you're aiming at.... Above 128, or for VBR, LAME is the best at the moment. Under 128, the Frau based encoders tend to perform better...
I know most will say they wouldn't encoded under 196 anyway, but when using portable devices, 128 or even 96 might allow to stick some extra music songs. Same with mp3 car players, I doubt you will notice much difference with the engine sound...
As for fastest, it seems to be the gogo encoder. It's a LAME hack/optimization, and it seems to be slightly lower quality, but it's lightining fast! You can download it from the LAME homepage in alternative compilations.
For archiving, it makes no sense to use the fastest encoder, only the best one. But there are some cases where it can be useful. Such as streaming (like getting input from CD or line-in, compressing on the fly and streaming), especially if you need CPU power for other stuff (multiple streams, video compression, mixing, live performance with audio processing...).

I've always like to use BladeEnc, http://bladeenc.mp3.no/ , to do my mp3 encoding. I don't know what the maker is doing as there hasn't been any news on the site for a long time. I hope the project isn't dead. As for speed, it's quite fast IMO but I can't really say since I haven't used anything else besides Sound Limit, which was horribly slow.

BladeEnc is not bad, but be careful about the bitrate you use... At 128, BladeEnc is actually pretty bad. It's good at around 192 and excellent at 256... It's definately *not* a low bitrate encoder...
But then, everyone should use 192 or high quality VBR... I wonder why I still see a whole bunch of files encoded at 128 (and some even with Xing at 128 ) on Kazaa...

thanks for your replies so far!

but yes, I'm using the encoder mostly for files on my portable mp3-player

most of the time I 're-encode' higher bitrate mp3s so I can fit 'em on the player

so what I need is the best lower bitrate encoder (96 or 128 kbps)

thnkz

ONE

http://www.musicmatch.com

they have a link to the free encoder, but you may have to look hard on the site for it.

I rip at 9x at 160kbps.

For ripping, use EAC. CDex is also quite good for newbies, as EAC is admittedly very complicated to set up.

For encoding, LAME is the best for high bitrates. For bitrates <= 128, FhG is probably better.

Xing sucks at ANY bitrate, personally I can tell when I listen to a Xing-128 mp3 within seconds...

Blade isn't a BAD encoder (per se), but...

* It doesn't have a joint-stereo mode (this means that for average-high bitrates, ~192 kbps, it isn't as efficient as LAME or FhG and tends to sound quite worse).

* It produces HORRIBLE high-frequency artifacts. Try to focus on the sound of a high-hat in your favorite rock song. Most likely it will sound very "unnatural". These artifacts are VERY offensive for myself, but some of my friends say they cannot hear them. So it's a question of whether YOU can hear them... try it.

[Personally I won't use Blade anymore, and certainly not at anything less than 256kbps].

VBR is IMHO a must-do for encoding, it's really MUCH MUCH more efficient than CBR, and for the same filesize you get much better quality.

Edit: A final point. If you plan on sharing your Mp3's, please consider strongly the EAC/LAME solution. This way you provide high quality mp3s for ALL of us who use filesharing programs. If everyone did this, we wouldn't have to waste time downloading files only to find they were Xing-encoded... Thank you!

you can detect the used encoder of any mp3 file with the great program EncSpot. Xing and Blade are both rated pretty "bad" by this Prog. Good rated Codex are: MP3 Producer Pro, FHT ACM Codec, and LAME (Xing and Blade only @ very high bitrates).

In CDex try using the 'r3mix' VBR setting under Lame. Nearly perfect MP3's (about the same file size as straight 192). In EAC if you configure the latest Lame externaly '--alt-preset standard' will give very nice results.