In reply to:
Fraunhofer may have started it but they have lost faith with more then a few over there high charges for license fees for any of there A codecs and the speed as you have mentioned, is brutal to say the least. However Fraunhofer is by far the way to go if you rip at lower bitrates.
And if you have time on your hands, you get a darned good quality MP3 at the rate. As for it's speed, well, for someone like me, I compress a few songs a month for bands' websites as their new singles come out, and the difference between encoding at 1/5 real time and 4x real time is kind of moot. I'm more concerned about total quality for file size.
In reply to:
LAME and a few others are designed with a higher bit rate in mind and are not user friendly for the most part. As you know I do it all at 320kbs which is overkill and I know it but when you have almost 300gigs of storage I don't lose any sleep over it.
If you'd like to put your encoder where your mouth is, I'll gladly supply the same uncompressed 15 second WAV for you to compress at 320kbps with LAME and we can compare again.
Bren R.
