BladeEnc For Linux

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.

BladeEnc's output quality is one of those rare subjects that completely divides the world in two parts. Either you love it or you hate it, there never seems to be an opinion inbetween. Different audiophiles and mp3 experts tends to come to completely different conclusions depending on their methods and testsamples.

The reason for this is of course that BladeEnc is a very different mp3 encoder (compared to Fraunhofer, LAME etc) with a very unique approach to mp3 encoding.

In order to compress sound to an mp3 file, you need to make certain sacrifices in quality. Taking into account how we percieve sound, the mp3 encoder tries to remove the details that it believes us to be least likely to notice. How much that needs to be removed depends on the bitrate and the encoder often has the choice of doing different kinds of sacrifices.

It can remove low volume tones that are "shadowed" by high volume tones of similar frequencies, remove the high frequency part of the sound spectrum, cut down the stereo effect (so called joint stereo) and simply decrease the samplerate. What approach is the best depends on a lot of things, like the style of music and the selected bitrate.