What is the best free MP3 encoder?
It depends exactly how you define “free” and how you propose to determine the “best”. I wouldn’t presume to make an authoritative statements about the best, but if you download CDEX from: www.cdex.n3.net it includes the Blade and LAME encoders, both of which are very good at bitrates of 160 kbps or higher. And yes, it is free. The various versions of encoder produced by Fraunhofer are very good, but about the only version that’s legitimately “free” is the one included with Microsoft Netshow (downloadable from www.microsoft.com) and that only works up to 56 kbps, which is pretty useless. If you download a program called L3encwin, which so far as I know is still available from various shareware sites (I believe I downloaded it from www.winfiles.com), it includes the old Fraunhofer encode and decode programs that work up to 128 Kbps. L3encwin itself is just a Windows front end you can use, since the old Fraunhofer programs just work from a command line.
