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."

Comments

wow

[tps12]

I'm impressed. Is this the first example of someone in Free Software recognizing his project isn't as good and just letting it go? Imagine if the creators of gnutella clients, mp3 players, or chat clients did this. Hopefully, this will be a growing trend. We all benefit when inefficiency is eliminated.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand why this got modded down, but it's true. Blade really was inferior to LAME, and gnutella really does suck.

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, it appears he is trying to start his own company. Good show!

Re:wow

[gnugnugnu]

Being moderated as troll was a bit harsh.

It was also pretty cool when GIDE and Anjuta merged.

It was not like you suggested something really implausable like OpenOffice porting to Gnome.

KDE Gnome merger is never going to happen, the advantage for commercial interests of using gkt remains even and is an option worth keeping even for those who prefer the KDE desktop.
The language difference between KDE and Gnome is also a big deal.

But that is no reason for use to not to want interoperability and a better unified more coherent vision of open source.

It is tragic that no distribution was willing to pick up the X Setup tools, too much vested interest in their own custom tools.
http://primates.ximian.com/~chema/xst
Maybe some one will port them to Gtk2 and debian. There seem to be gradually more and more people who get that usuability and accesibility are important even if they dont necessarily know anything about it. the potential for having nice graphical admin tools with standardised config files and being able to remote update the rest of the network based on the configuration of your test machine is just awesome.

while we are being unfairly branded as trolls i definately think some of the video media player programs need to be culled. my money is on gstreamer surviving and maybe something based on xinelib too, dont know which KDE apps are best though.

Kudos to the author of BladeEnc, be cool to see what he does next.

aww man

[skotte]

blade is my fFavorite! i really enjoy his personal outlook on the technology, and greatly appreciate all the work put in on the product.

ah well, i cant blame him. lets hope he keeps the latest version available fFor a while.

i agree with his observations on Ogg Vorbis. it is basically better. but i think until it is a little more widely used, i'll stick with blade.

thanks fFor a good run!

Re:aww man

[Anonymous Coward]

why do you want to get inferior quality ? Use lame 3.92 with the alt-presets!

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.

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It's no major loss since the LAME encoder makes much better sounding MP3 files in my listening tests.

Is there anywhere to still download the binaries

[His name cannot be s]

Is there anywhere to still download the binaries?

I'd like to preserve it for posterity ;)

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.

Perhaps he could work with the Theora project?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

If he's into multimedia and codecs and such. I'd love to see usable code come out of the Ogg/Theora project soon - especially an encoder...

He's obviously got talent and experience with related coding from BladeENC, and Theora has a similar goal ("free" multimedia for wide use)...

Not that I'm anxious to see Theora take off or anything :-)

Re:Is there anywhere to still download the binarie

[Anonymous Coward]

use lame, you'll get better quality but no "tonal purity" ROFL

Lame

[smeschini]

I was used to encode with BladeEnc, probably I'll switch to LAME... :-)

Salvatore Meschini
http://salvatoremeschini.cjb.net/
http: //web.tiscali.it/salvatoremeschini/
http://member s.xoom.virgilio.it/smeschini/

Goodbye BladeEnc

[smeschini]

I'm used to encode with LAME, so I'm not too sad for this news... :-)

Salvatore Meschini
http://salvatoremeschini.cjb.net/
http: //web.tiscali.it/salvatoremeschini/
http://member s.xoom.virgilio.it/smeschini/

So long, and thanks for all the ideas

[totalXSive]

I'm sorry to see BladeEnc go. Okay, I never liked it as an encoder, but it did start the ball rolling, and was the first DLL-based encoder (in fact the Lame DLL is built on the commands originally used by BladeEnc).

Let's hope that its developer helps out with Lame or with Ogg Vorbis and its related technologies. I'm very impressed by Ogg as an audio format, and can see it rivalling Windows Media Audio in the not so distant future.