Hi Chuck: As the bladeenc site says, they're not about low bit-rate encoding. In my personal opinion, lame shits all over it. Bladeenc reckon they're better at rates over 128K, but I'm yet to hear it. Lame is certainly better at 128K and below. I don't have the August 6 beta, didn't know there was one actually. Lame does do an OK job at encoding vorbis streams, but only to a point. The vorbis code up until this week from vorbis.org only really supported encoding at higher bitrates like 160. Lame will do lower, but I think it uses it's MP3 engine and alters the output to encode vorbis instead. Don't get me wrong, it still sounds better than MP3 even produced by the same encoder, but I don't think it sounds as good as vorbis will sound at the same rates. I'd look out for another version of lame to hit the streets soon as Tuesday saw the release of vorbis 1.0beta2. As you may recall from the interview, this does 128K encoding and might even do 96, haven't looked. The program listed on vorbis.com for encoding has changed from an ogg-ised version of lame 3.84alpha to a program called oggenc. I haven't tried it yet but I do intend to. I might also say while I'm here that if you want a straight player, then I'd probably recommend freeamp. But, and it's a big but, you need the latest available code. There is a version labeled freeamp 2.1beta5vorbis, but the vorbis support doesn't work with any other than the X gdk interface. freeamp 2.1beta6 will fix this, but last I checked, it hadn't been released yet. Until it is, you will have to checkout the CVS code. This does work, believe me. I finally after 4 weeks of chasing it and E-mails to freeamp developers, have a freeamp that will play ogg vorbis in console mode. If you want some content to listen to, check out www.vorbis.com. There is a They Might Be Giants song at 96K that sounds quite impressive, and it's only 1.4 meg. Geoff. -- Geoff Shang <gshang10 at scu.edu.au> ICQ number 43634701
