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Mp3
Encoder Mp3 encoder are the crucial part in the game of compressing and decompressing sound. Here you can win or loose.
The most important part for encoding is the codec. A codec is the very important part of a program, that contains the algorithms for encryption (name comes from compress/decompress).
While decoding is exactly specified in the ISO standard it only provides two sample implementations (one simple and one complex) for encoding. This is why the encoding quality differs from codec to codec .
Here are the mp3 codecs that are interesting for us.
The Fraunhofer Codec
The Fraunhofer institute originally developed the first codec and also have a patent on the way to do it. For a long time this was the only choice regarding quality. The Lame converter just got better and better and now he's leading the crowd.
The LAME codec
Now, at the end of 2004 the freeware open source LAME encoder has taken the lead. It sounds more natural at the standard rate of 128 KBit/s and gets constantly improved. I would suggest using this encoder. Here is software which uses the LAME encoder. Also a plug-in for Winamp is available.
The Xing
codecXing developed a codec that sounded almost as good, but was much faster (6-8x). It has some slight artifacts that are sometimes audible at higher frequencies like a slight flanging effect. If you need to do a lot of files at a fair audio quality you may consider using this one.