The well known and seriously outdated Blade MP3 encoder project has been officially discontinued by the developer Tord Jansson. This is actually very good news since many people were still using Blade while LAME MP3 encoder outperforms it greatly in quality and speed. Great thing is that he now promotes OGG Vorbis on his very popular website.
*Today we have a better alternative in Ogg Vorbis.
*Audio encoding technology has never really been my cup of tea
*...and felt that other free encoders (most notably LAME) did a much better job for the average mp3 user
BladeEnc News
Written by: Lasse Penttinen @ 15 Aug 2002 1:59
The end of BladeEnc
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MarkG
OGG Rocks!! We just need some hardware Vorbis players, which I'm sure will appear, as there is no licencing to pay...
15.8.2002 09:31 #1
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A_Klingon
It sure does, Mark. And I sure *do*. (Want hardware support).
I really have to stop doing this.....multi-tasking is going to be the death of me. I'm compressing a dvd to mpeg-1 in the background with TMPEnc (it's at over 90% now); encoding the Rolling Stones' 'Hot Rocks' album to ogg vorbis format in a minimized DOS window; surfing A/D & replying in here; and I'll likely be downloading some music tracks momentarily via 'Download Accelerator' while all/most of the above is going on.
Am I looking for a Win-98 crash or *what*? <ggg>
This is what happens when one has too much to do and not nearly enough time to do it in. :)
Anyway, back on topic.... I'm glad that Tord Jansson is honest enough to admit that his Blade is really outdated & inferior now. An honest admission from an apparently very honest gentleman. And quite a boost too, for my favourite audio compression format. I've noticed something else too, which may or may not be happening: I see fewer independant .mp3 files offered for download nowadays, and those I do find, seem to be a bit harder to retrieve. (mp3.com for instance).
I don't suppose this has much to do with any widespread waning of mp3's popularity, but more to do with Fraunhofer's now-infamous download-fee requirement$, which I assure you, in light of ogg vorbis' totally free & unpatented, unrestricted nature -- (not to mention that Vorbis is *no longer* in beta stage) -- is going to deal a *horrific* blow to mp3 in general.
I still download mp3 files though, because my new Sony standalone dvd player handles self-made mp3 data discs better than any other player I have ever had the pleasure to own. (Sony has finally gotten off it's ass and made their recent machines totally compatible with self-made cdrs and cdrws - i.e. red-book cdrs, music data cdrs, video-cd cdrs), something they took their freaking time getting around to, but personaly, I would gladly have paid a high $ premium to have .ogg format compatibility, instead of mp3.
Sony could have done this at no cost.
Reasoning: They've already incorporated .mp3 circuitry into my player - using ogg circuitry instead would have been no more expensive, *plus*, they paid a fee to the Fraunhofer folks in Germany to use the mp3 format, when they *could* have used .ogg for FREE.
But as usual, I am beginning to ramble..... I will have to scoot off to see what Mr. Jansson has to say about ogg vorbis.
Thanks as usual, for the update!
-- KlingonAgent --
P.S. Just a quickie question: Do you suppose mp3lizard.com would be willing to consider (accept) .ogg uploads?
[absolutely NO fees involved, guys] ...just a thought...
- KA -
17.8.2002 00:59 #2
