anyone ever heard of BladeEnc? command-line encoder which allows gapless encoding of tracks that blended together on cd. not perfect, but in my opinion, an occasional tiny 'click' (rarely happens) is better than a space in the sound.

http://bladeenc.mp3.no/

if anyone knows of an encoder that does the job better, please let me know.

I did not realize that Blade had that option. How new is this?

We have all been discussing gapless in LAME, but I didn't realize blade was trying to handle it....

BladeEnc 0.94.2 i believe is the version number - not very new. and it doesn't try - it succeeds. the click i mentioned is pretty rare. i already have about 12 cds encoded this way, and i get the click on maybe 3 tracks out of the lot. worked fine so far in v1.03 on the empeg and using the Gapless Output plugin for Winamp. i'll stick with it until someone shows me something better.

I'll add that information to the FAQ now, thanks.

hey, i'll be glad if this helps anyone out... just wish BladeEnc had a few more features... i've been itchin' to try VBR, but i don't want to sacrifice Gapless.

have you cake and eat it too
from the LAME --longhelp output

    --nogap <file1> <file2> <...>

                    gapless encoding for a set of contiguous files

    --nogapout <dir>

                    output dir for gapless encoding (must precede --nogap)

does LAME handle gapless encoding as well as BladeEnc?
also, does LAME do VBR? like i said, i've been wanting to try it out.

LAME does great with vbr, and nogap works great too.
here are my parameters :

lame -k -q0 ---nogap -v --vbr-new -V0 -b192 -B320 -F -ms --verbose

I didn't know anyone was still working on BladeEnc. (Actually, it looks like no one is; it hasn't been updated in about a year.) It has, in the general populace, been deprecated in favor of LAME for well over a year now. I cannot speak to it's gapless encoding capability, as I never even realized it had one, and I haven't used it in probably two or three years (it seems that long, anyway). But, with the possible exception of the quality of the gaplessness (which, again, I cannot speak about), I think you'll find that LAME is a better encoder. Many people think it is just as good or better than the Fraunhofer encoder. YMMV.

(But, to actually answer your question, yes, it can do VBR. It can also do CBR and ABR.)

I knew LAME was a better encoder... but I didn't know it offered gapless.

And on the subject of gapless in LAME - I downloaded LAME 3.92 last night and tried it out. Definitely a better encoder - but I tried --nogap (not ---nogap, got an error with 3 dashes), and it didn't work - not with VBR or CBR.

Am I doing something wrong? I used dcosta's settings posted earlier in this thread.

Others have reported difficulty in getting nogap to work correctly under LAME.

In my experience, it was very touchy about how to assemble the command line parameters, and it could only encode a group of wave files and you had to pass it the parameters of all of the wave files at the same time, you couldn't just give it a single wave file.

In this case, I pulled 2 tracks from a cd that were supposed to blend together. I thought I'd listen to the BladeEnc version and then the LAME version. I used LAME's .BAT file and put the settings in there, then went to my command prompt and typed LAME.BAT *.WAV. It encoded fine, but when i listened to the transition, it skipped as if I had encoded with any encoder that doesn't support gapless.

Right, in my experience, you can't say *.wav.

You have to say --nogap track01.wav track02.wav track03.wav before it will work.

Well like I said, using the batch file that came with the encoder, and just changing the settings, it encoded just fine. VBR worked and sounded good. But not gapless.

And as for listing the tracks to be encoded, at least with 3.92, in my experience, if you type TRACK01.WAV TRACK02.WAV TRACK03.WAV, the first track will be saved over the second track as track02.wav, but it's really an mp3, and then the second track (now a copy of the first as mp3) will get saved as track03.wav, but also really an mp3, and then you will have track03.mp3, an actual mp3. But because of all the copying, all of these files will be the same track.

I think the nogap parameter changes the way the command line interpreter works. The only way I was ever able to make the nogap feature work in LAME was to specify multiple file names on the command line.

Well I suppose this will take some trial and error then. I'm pretty stubborn, so if it does work, I will find it. I want this to work with gapless, VBR, and using the batch file, because I know LAME is the better encoder. But then, I have BladeEnc's command's memorized after using it for several years... and LAME, although it looks much the same, is all new to me.

BUT I WON'T GIVE UP.

Well, I got it. Looks like I have myself a new encoder. Good thing I only have about 100 CDs to encode... before my empeg is fixed.

Do you experience the same thing I did when I got --nogap working in LAME... in other words, you still occasionally get a click or a pop between two tracks?

Yes, I do. I think I may have mentioned earlier in the thread about BladeEnc doing it, too. It does happen, but not all the time. I certainly take that over a second of silence on transitions that I'm not supposed to notice.

And sorry for the late reply - I seem to only be able to make posts from work, and then only when i have time. It won't work from home.

In reply to:

---

Well, I got it. Looks like I have myself a new encoder.

---

Good news. Any details on the settings/steps used? Perhaps attach the .bat file (if used).

Using the .BAT file that came with the encoder only gave me problems. I keep a text file with what I type on the commandline in the same folder, as well as a shortcut to the Command Prompt. That way I just copy/paste. As for the settings: after going through them all to determine what I do and do not want, my settings came out pretty much the same as Dave's (dcosta), listed earlier in this thread. Also, I list each file name as Tony suggested (also earlier in this thread). One special note, though - make sure each of your filenames have 2 spaces between them on the commandline, not 1.

Ah, two spaces between filemames.
Thanks, stranger. :-)
(in reference to DeadFire's posts about posting problems)

More specifically, I think the commandline was designed to work like this:

lame (your settings) 01.wav(space)01.mp3(space)(space)02.wav(space)02.mp3, etc. The idea is by using a single space, you specifiy that the first file is encoded and saved with the filename immediately after it, and then use two spaces to tell LAME to start a new file.

Eesh, that's an awful concept. Last time I did any programming, spaces between arguments were never considered to be part of the command line that got passed to the program (unless they were quoted). I can't imagine that's really changed...

Well, maybe I'm wrong and there's another way. But I've only had 2 days with it, and that's how I got it to work the way I want... so it's good enough for me. Like I said earlier, I just copy/paste it into the commandline anyway.

Under Unix, there would be no way for those spaces to be passed to the process unless, as you said, they were explicitly quoted. The shell will interpret what is to be the delineation between arguments and just hand those arguments to the process that's run. Now, I don't know how that all would work under Windows (I imagine it would be the same, but who knows?), but, given the fact that LAME is developed under Unix machines and 99% of the ports out there are just cramming that same code into Windows, I doubt that that is actually the case.

But don't quote me on that. I could be wrong.