Latest News

2002-08-11   BladeEnc development officially discontinued.

I guess most of you read the writing on the wall a long time ago, so I just thought I should make this official: I'm no longer actively developing BladeEnc and I don't intend to continue development ever. There are five main reasons that I've stopped working on BladeEnc, these are: I developed BladeEnc in order to scratch my own itch, I needed a fast and reliable tool for converting hundreds of CDs to high quality mp3s. If encoding got a little bit faster I saved myself a substantial amount of time. If quality improved, all my future encodings would be in better quality. If usability improved, I'd save myself some inconvenience. But today all these incentives are gone, I've already built up a library of around 400 of my favourite albums and I only occasionally encode something new. Faster computers and previous optimizations have made the process so quick that I find no reason to improve speed anymore and any quality improvements will only affect the few new records I encode. In a kind of ironic twist I've also become a victim of the success of the mp3 format, I find it increasingly harder and harder to find good albums to encode. A few years ago, my colleagues used to bring CDs to work and working in an environment with 20-50 people of my own age then gave me a continous supply of new CDs to rip. Nowadays people keep mp3s (often at just 128 kbit or some other lousy quality) on their harddrives and very rarely bring their CDs.   I suffered from a burn-out during the most of 2000. For one and-a-half year I had been responsible for a project with impossible deadlines and a minimal budget. For the most of that time I had to work many late nights, almost every weekend and had hardly any vacation at all. In the end it all got too much for me and I got burned out. For almost a year I couldn't get myself to do any non-necessary development and when I finally came back to my old self again, I had already lost more than a year in the "mp3 encoder race" and felt that other free encoders (most notably LAME) did a much better job for the average mp3 user and it would take a lot of effort to catch up in a reasonable time. BladeEnc still had its niches though, especially at high bitrate encodings and when encoding certain kinds of music, so I kept on developing a bit in order to make it better for me and my devoted users, but the desire to improve it in every possible way had disappeared.   The patent issues. Having to hassle the legal aspects, see much of the encoder scene disappear and finally be forced to take away the binaries from my homepage took most of the fun out of it. When I started there were numerous projects to make mp3 encoders and the scene was bustling with activity and enthusiasm and I loved to hang around there, the lawyers killed all that.   Today we have a better alternative in Ogg Vorbis. The developers of Ogg Vorbis have done a fantastic job in giving us a completely free format (and tools) for compressed audio that is clearly better than mp3. Better quality, smaller files and no patents or royalties. In light of this, and the treatment I've gotten from Fraunhofer's and Thomson's lawyers, I no longer feel like advocating and supporting the mp3 format. Why should I then continue to develop and improve a tool for generating mp3 files?   Audio encoding technology has never really been my cup of tea. I more or less slipped into it when I out of frustration with existing tools wrote BladeEnc in 1998. Due to my background I always felt that I lacked some of the mathematical foundation that was necessary in order to do the best possible job. I'm more a software architect than an audio engineer or mathematician. My skills are in designing and building elegant and flexible systems for handling complex tasks in an optimal way, not dealing with FFTs, compression technologies or scientific models for subjective perception of audio. Now, four years later, I feel more like eventually starting some new hobby project which lies closer to my area of knowledge and interest. What will happen now? I know there are a lot of people who occasionally use BladeEnc, so I intend to keep this page online together with the latest source code for the forseable future. Mitar has told me his intentions of doing the same with the binaries. Besides, there might come a minor update now or then if I receive some interesting patch or some bug is discovered. I'm actually planning to put up a small update in maybe a week, because I've made some minor updates since the last release. BladeEnc development might start again when/if somebody shows a sincere interest in taking over maintainership, until then there will likely not be any major update. I just want to end with saying that I've enjoyed the trip and I definitely don't regret starting this project. It brought me much more than I imagined it ever would. I got myself a better tool for mp3 compression than I had planned, I got introduced to the free software movement and Linux, I got friends all over the world and I got a name and recognition among my peers. What will I be doing next? I'm not sure about the details and I can't devote as much time as before to my hobbies, but I'm likely to show up again with something new in a while. My devotion to the free software movement is as strong as ever and I just love to tinker with code, so you can be quite sure that you haven't seen the last of me yet.

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-09-02   Some updates to supporting products page.

Just a small update of the supporting products page with the removal of BFree and adding of a few new products. If you have some program you would like me to add then just mail me (even if you have mailed me before) and I might add it. I have been quite away from BladeEnc development for a while, but now I feel tempted to pick up the project again so things might start to move...

2001-06-29   MP3Pro vs Ogg/Vorbis.

Some people have written me and asked if I intend to support the new MP3Pro format in BladeEnc. My answer is maybe in the future, but I'm not especially thrilled about the format and won't throw myself over it. The reason is that Fraunhofer/Thomson continues their predatory and restrictive licensing practices. Fraunhofer/Thomson have been bullying developers and other users for ages about licenses for the support or use of a fileformat that now is an established standard. People have put up with this, simply because there was no better alternative. All competing formats were even more closely guarded and restricted by their creators, making the choice of mp3 as the standard for compressed audio simply a choice of the lesser of many evils. But today we have an even better choice, Ogg/Vorbis. Ogg/Vorbis is a new format that provides a clearly better quality/size ratio than mp3 (and possibly even better than mp3pro, the judge is still out on that one) while having solved a lot of design issues in a much more elegant way. But the best thing about Ogg/Vorbis is that it's an entirely open and free format. No licensing restrictions, no fees to pay and no company telling under what terms you may use it and not use it. So, for me the choice is simple, I will support Ogg/Vorbis and not MP3Pro and I urge all users of the mp3 format to do the same conscious decision. If MP3Pro becomes the next standard then we will end up in the same sticky situation again and I for one don't want that.

2001-05-08   BladeEnc 0.94.2 released.

Ok, the crash bug we thought we had fixed in 0.94.1 was apparently still there. This version has been futher fixed and verified to work properly so there shouldn't be any troubles like that anymore. Andre has also fixed some new FFT calculations which should be slightly faster, but they produced a slight speed decrease on my machine (about 1%). I've included them anyway and would appreciate reports on how they perform compared to earlier 0.94.x versions on different architectures.

2001-04-24   BladeEnc 0.94.1 released.

I've just released BladeEnc 0.94.1. This is a bugfix release and includes 3 fixes: one cosmetic, one fixing "bladeenc crashes on certain wav files" (very uncommon but did happen in 0.94.0) and one making BladeEnc able to compile on Solaris "out of the box" again.

2001-04-13   Microsoft and the music industry trying to destroy MP3!

In this article you can read about how Microsoft and the music industry is trying to stear away people from using MP3 to new proprietary formats that makes copying and free sharing harder. An excerpt: "These companies, which have the music industry's blessing, are encouraging those who download music to use new proprietary software formats that make the audio sound significantly better but also make it harder to share copyright- protected songs." "Microsoft, for example, plans to severely limit the quality of music that can be recorded as an MP3 file using software built into the next version of its personal-computer operating system, Windows XP. But music recorded in the Redmond, Wash., software company's own format, called Windows Media Audio, will sound clearer and require far less storage space on a computer." I don't know about you people out there, but I value my ability to move my audio files between different equipment and make a copy of a copy of a copy. I'm not one of those who trade mp3 files over the internet, but I have converted all my CDs to mp3 so I easily can listen to the music I purchased whenever I want and wherever I am. I also want to be able to keep my music collection for the rest of my life, therefore I need to be able to repeatedly make copies of them when the storage media starts to get too worn out to work reliably. If you feel like me, then stay away from proprietary formats and keep supporting the free formats even if it will take some more effort as long as the open standards are under siege. If you want something better than mp3 then go for Ogg/Vorbis a new completely free format (open sourcecode, no licensing restrictions and no patents) which rivals the latest commercial ones in size and quality. Ogg/Vorbis is currently in beta-stage and I'm working on adding support for it in a future version of BladeEnc.

2001-03-07   Major update of homepage.

As you can probably can see I've updated nearly all the info on the homepage. The quality and speed sections are brand new with up-to-date info. The FAQ is slightly updated. The source archive now contains the DLL manual, header and example code as well as some older source code. The supporting products page have been updated and simplified a lot so I easier can keep it up-to-date in the future (please tell me about supporting products that I have missed!) and there's a few other changes as well. Hope you like it and find the new information useful.

2001-03-07   BladeEnc 0.94.0 Released!

I've just put up the sources for BladeEnc 0.94.0. This is, as the version number suggests, a new stable branch and incorporates all the improvements done in the unstable releases. Most of the speed increasing improvements had allready been backported to the 0.92.x branch, but 0.94.0 also includes a number of quality improving fixes (made by Andre). No changes have been made to the psycho acoustic model so BladeEnc still has the same quality advantages/disadvantages compared to other encoders as before (tweaked for high bitrate encoding and with a preference for maintaining tonal purity), so you should just expect the quality to be a bit better throughout. However, these quality improvements breaks the "binary identical output rule", so don't expect the same output as with previous versions. Various OS/compiler compatibility improvements have also been made and make/project files have been added for a lot of architectures, making it easier to generate binaries for non-unix systems. Hope you enjoy it! :)

2001-02-06   Please test BladeEnc 0.93.10!

We badly need people to test BladeEnc 0.93.10 for any improvement or degradation in quality, so please download it and put it through some serious testing! Binaries for most systems are available from the Slovenian BDP and source is available from here as usually. We are basically sitting here waiting for people to give it some proper testing so we finally can declare it stable and move on with new, exciting improvements.

2001-01-20   BladeEnc 0.93.10-unstable-2 online, fixes Windows compile bug.

Due to a little misstake (and me being stressed enough to not test it on Windows before letting it out), BladeEnc 0.93.10 failed to compile on Windows (and possibly some other platforms as well). I've put 0.93.10-unstable-2 online which corrects that problem. Thanks to Sam Harper for telling me about it.

2001-01-19   BladeEnc 0.92.7-stable and 0.93.10-unstable online!

BladeEnc 0.92.7-stable is online. Only notable changes is fixing of the bug that caused 8-bit samples to crash 0.92.6 and that BladeEnc now compiles nicely with Borland's family of C & C++ compilers. No use to upgrade unless you're using Borland compilers or 8-bit samples. BladeEnc 0.93.10-unstable is also online and it has a lot of improvements and some serious bugfixes compared to 0.93.7. We would like some serious quality testing of this version, so please test it and report any quality improvement or loss compared to what's produced by the stable branch. It should generate better quality due to numerous improvements and fixes, but we need to be sure that no noticable quality degrading bug has slipped through before we release it as stable, so please help us test it! By the way, it's faster too... ;) As usual, all the changes are in the changelog.

2001-01-10   BladeEnc 0.92.6-stable online, major speed improvements!

Andre has backported some more of the safe optimizations in the 0.93.x-unstable branch. The result is a speed increase of around 30% on my AMD K6-2! Some other improvements have also been made, check the changelog for details.

2000-12-07   BladeEnc Newsletter link fixed.

The link on the top of this page to the newsletter subscription page was wrong, but have been fixed now. Thanks to Enrico Zini for telling me.

2000-11-30   BladeEnc Newsletter now available!

Guess the title and the above comment says it all. I have been playing around with the settings and hopefully should everything work perfectly now.

2000-11-30   New binary distribution point

A new BDP has been added, this time in Brazil. Link available from the download page as usual. This page is (or will be) provided in both English and Brazilian Portuguese.

2000-11-27   Consultation page online

I've added a new page to this site called consultation. It is meant to contain info about companies that can provide BladeEnc related consultation work. Currently only my own company Moonbridge Software is listed, but I intend to let any company/individual that has made major contributions to BladeEnc to get listed.

2000-11-27   BladeEnc 0.92.5 released!

Since BladeEnc 0.94.0 has been so much delayed (quality and stability issues), me and Andre decided to backport the safe improvements from the unstable 0.93.x branch to give you something more up-to-date to use in the meantime. The most notable improvements for the enduser are speedups and the -nogap option which gives you the possibility to make mp3 files with no audiable click or gap inbetween the tracks when played in sequence, using an mp3 player which supports it (mpg123 works perfectly and WinAmp has a plugin for gapless replay). However, be sure to read the updated manual before trying since there are a lot of details to take into account. All major changes are listed on the changelog page and the sourcecode is available from the source archive. Binaries should start appearing on the distribution points within a few hours or days (depending on how busy people are).

2000-11-23   Software patents stay banned in Europe - for now...

Thanks in large parts to all the people signing the petition against software patents in Europe, the first major victory against the patent lobby has been won! All countries voted against software patents, except Switzerland, Austria and Liechtenstein who did not vote. Many thanks to all who signed the petition and congratulations to all who worked hard for this! However, the battle is still not over, don't expect the lobbying groups to give up that easily, so please don't stop supporting this cause! Get more people to sign the petition and do whatever you can to help. This article at The Register provides some more details for those that are interested.

2000-11-07   BladeEnc for MacOS updated

Petteri Kamppuri has updated his MacOS port of BladeEnc. Some problems with spaces in pathnames have been solved and a binary preference file has been added. These are all Mac-specific changes and doesn't affect any other port. Link available from the download page.

2000-11-07   Interesting Quality Test...

Chris Johnson has made some very interesting quality tests of BladeEnc and a number of other Mp3 encoders using the most sophisticated technical test method I've seen so far. As always, technical test methods should be taken with a few grains of salt since they never give you the whole picture, but the method used is very interesting and his findings are very well in line with what people doing serious listening tests have reported to me over the years, giving this test more credibility than most. It also explains quite well why there are large groups of people who either love or hate the quality of BladeEnc. It has very much to do with what kind of music you listen to and your personal acceptance level for different kinds of artifacts. BladeEnc has very different priorities compared to the other encoders. Some quotes from his conclusions: "So, to sum up- in the high bit rate area it comes down to LAME and BladeEnc." "BladeEnc defined an area all its own- extreme tonal purity and sweetness at the expense of transient definition and punch- and just kept getting better until at 320K it was doing things ... that no other encoder [even] pretended to do." "The message to learn here is simply that each encoder, whether by design, optimisation or mere coincidence, has developed a sonic personality that is completely distinct and centers on different values. Fraunhofer is all about low bit rates- and disgraces itself when it tries to act High End. LAME seems to be about energy and high performance, and sure enough, it hits some peaks to exceed all the other encoders in just those areas. And Blade seems to place tonal purity above all else, especially transient clarity- and tonal purity is exactly where it cannot be surpassed- if you're willing to pay the price." Link: http://www.airwindows.com/encoders/index.html

2000-10-22   Put the changelog back online...

Put the changelog back online. It used to be a part of the download page, but when that was removed it disappeared.

2000-10-21   New binary distribution point added and some minor changes of the pages.

A second binary distribution point is now online, link provided from the download page. Also made some minor changes and tweaks to some of these pages, updated some broken links etc.

2000-10-08   Changes and updates to some of the pages...

I've made some updates to some of the pages which were very out of date. The "About Me" and "Links" sections have been completely rewritten. The Download page has received a link to the MacOS version and the Sourcecode section now have up-to-date instructions on how to build and package both the executables and the DLL. A lot of other pages would also need to be updated, but that will have to wait for now.

2000-09-15   First binary distribution point up, please contribute binaries!

After a long delay, mainly having to do with me being busy, the first Binary Distribution Point is now online. Currently it doesn't have any binaries at all, so please contribute those of you who know how to compile and package BladeEnc. The link is on the download page. I've updated the instructions on how to compile and package BladeEnc on the source page, you might find that useful. On a sidenote I'm still missing the very interesting ID3-tag-and-jobdump-patch that I lost with my mailbox. So you who contributed that, please send it again if you are reading this, I would be very happy to include at least the ID3-part of it (the jobdump might be harder due to changes in the code).

2000-07-28   Back online, loads of mail lost... :(

It's been a long wait since the last news, but now I'm finally back online. During the last month I've been moving to a new town, helped my girlfriend to move (we are now sharing an appartment, which is a LOT better than living in different countries, a full days travel from each other using car, airplane and buss). We are now living in central Malmö, a town in the south of Sweden that none of us knew especially much about before, so we have spent quite some time just trying to find our way around the town and getting our appartment in order. Unfortunatelly I've also managed to screw up my mail and lost almost two months worth of e-mail from May 6 to July 4. :( This includes some very valuable e-mails from a few people sending patches, volunteering to be BDPs and doing quality tests, so if you have sent something important or valuable to me during this time, please send it again. I'm especially hoping to once again hear from the person who sent an id3tag-and-jobdump patch and the person from South Africa who volunteered to set up a BDP who I had some correspondance with. On a sidenote, we have received reports on quality degradation and bugs in 0.93.7, so don't use it for any important stuff. 0.93.8 will be out as soon as we (think) we have fixed them.

2000-06-16   Request for help to distribute binaries!!!

As most of you know, I'm not able to distribute precompiled binaries of BladeEnd due to patents om mp3 compression held by Fraunhofer IIS and Thomson Consumer Electronics. Although it is very likely illegal to enforce such patents for software here in Sweden (and the rest of Europe), I might still be taken to court and have to defend my position there if I push this issue. That process could become very long, exhausting and costly and might still end in failure. I have therefore decided to not confront this issue directly, but instead circumvent the problem to the largest extent possible, at least until my personal situation allows me to put more energy, time and money into solving this in a better way. The sollution I've decided for is the following: I keep on developing BladeEnc and distributing the sourcecode from my homepage. I'll include some information that it might be illegal to compile BladeEnc for anything except scientific or educational use in certain countries. One or more "binary distribution points" (hereafter refered to as BDPs) are set up in countries where there are no patents stopping us. These BDPs should be completely set up and administered by people living in the same category of countries. I will not take any part in the running of these BDPs not even supply them with binaries. They will have to get the sourcecode themselves from my homepage and compile it themselves or get someone else to do it. The BDPs should have a notice on their site explaining that it might be illegal to download the contents to certain countries (with a list and explanation included). I put links to the BDPs on my homepage, again with an explanation that it might be illegal to download BladeEnc binaries if you live in certain specified countries. This way we still keep BladeEnc binaries easily available for all the people living in countries where it's obviously legal to download and use them. People living in countries where it is (USA) or might be (Europe) forbidden are informed about the situation and can decide what to do themselves.   As you should understand by now, I therefore need people who can and are interested in providing and running BDPs to contact me. Here follows a list of the countries that are or is likely to be covered by mp3 encoding patents. The following countries are covered by patents:             Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Ireland Italy, Japan, Korea, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Neatherlands, USA. The following countries MIGHT still not be covered, although they're probably not. Some details from me and a quick call to respective countries patent office will find out.             Canada, Finland, Singapore, Hong Kong(?) and Hungary. The following countries are most likely OK, but we need to check some more to be sure:             Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey All countries NOT mentioned above are believed to be completely clear from MP3 related patents. Both you and the server needs to be placed in a country not covered by these patents. Here follows some general ideas on how I would like BDPs to be handled, but I haven't thought too much about it yet so things might change a bit: The web design is up to you, but you should have some text, provided by me, which warns about the legal problems in certain countries clearly noticable before people make a download. You should take great care in making sure that the binaries you distribute are correct, supplied with all mandatory files, virus free, optimized and not altered in any bad way. A small banner to finance the site and compensate you for your time is OK as long as the place doesn't get too commercial. If we end up having many BDPs controlled by different people, we should either divide the different architectures among the sites according to interest of the owner or find ways to cooperate to make sure that everyone has the latest and greatest binaries. Any kind of infighting is NOT tolerated! If you can compile one or more of the versions yourself, it's a clear bonus. Ok, that's it. I hope you people out there who aren't restricted by questionable patents wants to help me with this. Answers, comments and questions should be sent to tord.jansson@swipnet.se.

2000-06-15   Manual updated.

Updated the online manual to cover the new things in 0.93.7, including a whole chapter on gapless encoding.

2000-06-15   BladeEnc 0.93.7-unstable source in the source archive.

Put BladeEnc 0.93.7 online. Biggest change is that it *hopefully* works on all UNIX systems now without having to change the SYSTEM-define. Some minor bugfixes as well, they might have affected sound quality somewhat. Complete list of changes in the changeLog, accessible from the source archive. I still need people to do quality tests on this before we dare to release it as stable, but it seems quite stable to me.

2000-06-13   BladeEnc 0.93.6-unstable source in the source archive.

There were some problems compiling BladeEnc 0.93.5 on certain platforms, including Windows and Solaris. I've fixed those bugs now along with some other minor changes (see changelog in the source archive for details) and released it as 0.93.6-unstable. Thanks to Jeff Squyres for helping me find some of the bugs.

2000-06-12   BladeEnc 0.93.5-unstable sources in the source archive!

I've put 0.93.5-unstable online and would like as many as possible to test this version for quality changes. André Piotrowski has fixed what caused the quality degradation of 0.93.4 and made some more quality improvements, so this version should have better quality than any previous version of BladeEnc. However, testing is, as always, necessary to be sure, we have been wrong before :( And as if that was not enough, this version is also 47% faster on my machine than 0.92 and both the sourcecode distribution and generated binary is much smaller. All thanks to André! :) But I have also made some improvements to this version, including a -nogap switch witch lets you encode tracks that fade into each other (like Enigma and most live recordings) without any anoying 'click' inbetween the tracks. However, when I was finished I discovered that most mp3 players are adding a click on their own, something which has to be changed for a good continuous music experience. :( So far I've found that mpg123 (a UNIX & Windows commandline player) is able to play continuously without a click and kmpg (a KDE mp3 player) does it under good circumstances (when the next mp3 allready is in the file cache and the load on the machine is low). The -nogap switch needs some documentation that I haven't written yet, but the basic idea is that when using -nogap it makes sure that the tracks blends nice together in the order that they are given on the commandline (make sure to have them correctly sorted). I've also rewritten the installation instructions in the COPYING-file, making it cover all architectures and made system.h autodetect Windows and BeOS so the SYSTEM-define won't have to be changed when compiling on those systems. Windows Alpha users will probably get some problem with the autodetection, contact me if you know a good way to determine if it's running on an Alpha machine. I've received some more patches that looks very interesting, including one that adds ID3-tagging abilities to BladeEnc that I will merge in soon, but I wanted to get this version out the door first.

2000-05-13   MPI version of BladeEnc available!

Jeff Squyres has been working for a long time on a distributed version of BladeEnc using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) which allows you to distribute the encoding process onto any number of machines in a network as well as takes use of all the processors in multiprocessor machines (SMP) to speed up the encoding. It will take some time before SMP & MPI support gets included in the main BladeEnc development branch, so in the meantime has Jeff put up his own page devoted to his MPI version of BladeEnc on http://www.mpi.nd.edu/~jsquyres/bladeenc/. Here is his original announcement on the Bladeenc Developer maling list. Please note, that although his changes are based on the stable version 0.92.0, this MPI version should be considered unstable when it comes to quality since his changes have affected the output and we haven't put this version through serious testing yet. People who download and test this version are encouraged to send reports on any experienced quality difference (or lack thereof) to this address. I personally know almost nothing about MPI, so please send all questions regarding that to Jeff (see his page first though, so you don't swamp him with questions he allready has answered).

2000-05-13   New patches have been coming in...

Strange, for a long time I haven't really received any patches for BladeEnc and now suddenly some very intersting patches pop in at almost the same time! :) I'll take a throughly look at them as soon as possible and will hopefully be able to include some of them for 0.93.5.

2000-05-13   0.93.4-unstable has quality degradation

Thanks to all the people who have downloaded and tested 0.93.4, we have now found out that 0.93.4 actually produces lower quality than 0.92.0. As you probably allready know, 0.93.4-unstable contained experimental changes that we believed would improve the quality, but at least one of them lowered quality instead. 0.93.5 will have the most suspicious of these changes removed and we hope that you who tested 0.93.4 will be willing to test 0.93.5 as well. Thanks for a job well done!

2000-04-24   Diary on advogato.org

Just wanted to tell anyone who is interested that I've put up a personal page on advogato.org (username TordJ) with the address http://www.advogato.org/person/TordJ/ which includes a diary which I plan to update quite frequently. It will have a more personal focus, but might give you some hints of what's going on with BladeEnc before I post something more formal here.

2000-04-24   What's up with BladeEnc?

Ok, I tink it's about time that I just write a few lines explaining why things are moving so slowly for BladeEnc. The reason is simply that I'm in the middle of some major changes in my life and therefore have very little time and energy left for BladeEnc. I have decided to quit my job at UDS and move to another town (Malmö, much closer to where I come from so I will have friends and family just a bit more than an hours drive away). There I will attempt to start up my own company, which will be working with open source software. Also, right before Christmas I met a wonderful girl and we are now together, the only problem is that I live in Sweden and she lives in Finland, so we can only see each other about every 3rd or 4th weekend due to distance and travel expenses. We have therefore decided that she will come over to Sweden and live with me in Malmö. So you can imagine things are quite messed up for me now. At work I'm trying to get everything straight before I leave so that they're not left with any loose ends and at my sparetime I'm trying to spend as much time as possible with my girlfriend, friends from here (many of who I probably never will see again after I have moved) and generally getting everything prepared for the move and starting of the company. And right in the middle of that mess I have BladeEnc, including all the legal troubles. However, I have not grown tired of BladeEnc or anything, but I hope you understand the reason why things have been slow for a while and most likely will continue to be for some time to come... On the other hand, a lot of things regarding BladeEnc have been boiling for a while now, so don't be too surprised if things start to pop up quite rapidly for some time to come... ;)

2000-03-16   Added missing file to the 0.93.4-unstable archive

Apparently I missed to add the new file subs.h to the project, resulting in it not being included in the source archive. Added the file and put the source online as bladeenc-0.93.4-src-unstable-2.tar.gz. Thanks to all of you who informed me about my misstake.

2000-03-14   BladeEnc 0.93.4-unstable in the source archive...

The source code for a new unstable version of BladeEnc is available from the source archive. All the changes since 0.92.0 have been made by André Piotrowski and that's quite some changes! André has given the encoding engine a big overhaul and restructured, optimized, added comments and removed a lot of quality affecting bugs! He has also managed to get rid of the big dreaded "bladetab", resulting in a much smaller program and restored compatibility with machines with float types that are different that Intels. We have found the quality in this version to be notably better, at least when dealing with low and medium bitrates (although the lowest bitrates still sounds like crap). We also believe that high bitrate encoding has gained quality from these changes, but I haven't really been able to hear any difference there. If some of you could download, compile and test the quality of this version, you would be of great help. If you can find a sample that sounds worse when encoded with 0.93.4 than with 0.92.0, using the same settings, I would be VERY interested in hearing from you. If you have made extensive testings but couldn't find any quality degradation I would like to hear from you as well so I can get a picture of how well tested it has been. I know a lot of you are waiting to get the details about the patent situation and I just have to ask you to wait a bit more. I've been very busy lately with things not related to BladeEnc so I need some more time to put together the material. :(

2000-02-23   BladeEnc 0.92.0 available! :)   Binaries will have to go... :(

The sourcecode for BladeEnc 0.92.0 is now available from the source archive. It contains some bugfixes (including the one that made BladeEnc crash when turning stereo samples into mono) and some major restructuring and optimisations made by André, resulting in better code and a whopping speed increase of 34% on my machine!. Thanks a lot for your improvements André! André is still working hard on improving BladeEnc and has come up with some more changes that soon will be put into the next unstable release. They are likely to both speed up the encoding and increase the quality, but since the output no longer is identical to previous versions they will have to go through some testing before they get into a stable release. Oh, by the way, I've changed the version numbering a little bit. Now it works like the version numbers for the Linux kernel. That is, three numbers, separated by dots. First number is for major releases, middle number determines if it's a stable or unstable release (even numbers for stable and odd numbers for unstable) and the last number is just bugfix releases. That means that every version with the numbers 0.92.x is a stable release with just some minor bugfix to the previous one. Versions with the numbers 0.93.x are unstable releases that might work badly, crash or produce lower quality. Once we are positive that our changes in the unstable series are working correctly, we release the code as 0.94.0 (stable) and starts on 0.95.0 as a new unstable. If bugs are found in 0.94.0 we will release a fix with the number 0.94.1. You might wonder why I haven't put up any binaries for 0.92.0. The reason is that I'm still having trouble with Fraunhofer/Thomson and things are starting to heat up. Since their complaint is that I'm distributing products using their patented technology and they now are threatening to take me to court if I don't stop, I've decided to remove the binaries from my homepage. I will remove the binaries tomorrow, but you can rest assure that this is not the end of BladeEnc. I will place all the necessary details on these pages in a few days, so please don't mail me asking for details yet, I'll be busy writing together a lengthy piece explaining the situation, what I plan to do and what you can do to help.

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