Introduction

BladeEnc is a freeware MP3 encoder. It is based on the same ISO compression routines as mpegEnc, so you can expect roughly the same, or better, quality . The main difference is the appearance and speed. BladeEnc doesn't have a nice, user-friendly interface like mpegEnc, but it is more than three times faster, and it works with several popular front-end graphical user interfaces .
 

Background

Besides always being a music lover, I've had a habit of collecting things for as long as I can remember. So, when I decided a half year ago to assemble my own MP3 collection, it soon became almost an obsession. I encoded my own CD's, borrowed and encoded CD's from my friends, and swapped MP3's with distant friends and relatives. Although I seldom copied songs from Internet sites (I wanted complete albums, not just the most popular songs), I found myself roaming the net time after time, searching for the latest encoders and information on which encoders produced the best quality. Since I wanted to build a collection that I could enjoy for life, quality was a big issue for me. Since I definitely could hear the difference between a 128 kBit MP3 and the original CD, I decided to use 256 kBit for my collection. That way I would be on the safe side when it came to quality. The only problem was that most encoders didn't support bitrates above 128 kBit. Then SoloH's mpegEnc arrived as a gift from above. Not only did it support a huge number of bitrates (including 256 kBit) and have a nice user interface, it was also freeware! The only drawback was that it was noticeably slower than all the other encoders I tested. Some time later SoloH (the creator of mpegEnc) made the source code he had based mpegEnc on (some reference code from ISO) available through his web site. Since I'm a professional game programmer with a lot of knowledge and experience in writing fast and well-optimized code, I decided to download the source and see if I could improve the one thing that I found frustrating with mpegEnc: the slowness of encoding. After about a month of work (I'm very busy, so I could only spare a few hours each weekend) I had the first beta version of my encoder finished. It was somewhere between 50 and 100% faster than mpegEnc, depending on the machine, so I decided to tidy it up a bit and release it.