BladeEnc Development Officially Discontinued

skojt writes: "I saw on the Swedish site gnuheter.org that Tord Jansson has announced that he discontinues development of BladeEnc. He says that he is tired of lawyers, that Lame does a better job for the average user and that Ogg Vorbis is a better choice." BladeEnc fans need not worry too much, though -- Jansson also says on the site "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."

What next???

[OneFix]

I will first say that I used to use BladeENC for all of my MP3 encoding. And somewhere (about a year ago) I realized that LAME was advancing beyond BladeENC in terms of quality.

I also agree with his interpertation of MP3 and how the owners of the format have made it harder on developers as it became more widely accepted. I also agree that Ogg Vorbis is a better format than MP3. Vorbis is actually becomming very popular as a sound format for MPEG4-based video codecs (DIVX/XVID/etc). The main reason for this (besides the fact of higher quality and smaller size) is that OGG supports multiple channels (read AC3).

I would certainly be interested in seeing a new encoder by this author for the Ogg Vorbis format. I know that he mentions that:

Now, four years later, I feel more like eventually starting some new hobby project which lies closer to my area of knowledge and interest.

Of course, this is only a hope...I realise that directly before this he says:

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.

Hopefully, BladeENC is merely a beginning for him. I think that, while he might not have the extensive background required for writing an encoder, that may very well be the one thing that sets his project apart from an encoder like LAME.

Re:Is there anywhere to still download the binarie

[skojt]

Fraunhofer/Thomson, who hold the patents, forced him to remove any binaries from the site so you will have to use the source.

Re:wow

[moncyb]

I haven't been keeping track, but I doubt that this is the first time someone has dropped their own project because they don't think it's good enough. Most of the time they just fall into obscurity.

I agree that to some degree this is a good thing. I wish the GNOME and KDE people would do it. ;-) But seriously, these types of "bad" projects are really a good thing--it gives the inexperienced a chance to practice the craft. These sorts of projects only cause problems when they are over-hyped and/or many other projects start to require using stuff from these lame and bloated projects.

I did think BladeEnc was fairly good, however I stopped using it myself. Why? I had two problems with it it:

1. I like to record stuff at all sorts of sample rates from 8kHz all the way to 44.1kHz. As I remember, BladeEnc only worked with 44.1 kHz and therefore didn't really support low output bitrates.
2. The patent issues for mp3. Ogg Vorbis is a godsend.

I say good luck to Tord Jansson, and I hope to see more open source projects from him. On his homepage, [mp3.no] it appears he is trying to start his own company [worldonline.se]. Good show!