> I've been horrified by the sound of most encoders based on the Fraunhofer > reference code! WinLame is based on the Lame code, which is 100% Fraunhofer > Free (tm) code and was the best sounding encoder to my ears, last time I did > a comparison. Lame is still in active development which means that it is > getting better all the time. Well, Linux is 100% Microsoft free code and it still years away in terms of usability. Beside networking and related stuff it's pretty useless :) Fraunhofer is considered by many the best. And they have good reasons. But there are some unfortunate implementations or adaptations which stain it's reputation. However, it's still the best codec I've seen so far. On 128 kbps it beats many other codecs set on 192 kbps in terms of quality. I tried Lame a while ago and it had serious quality problems. I'll try to look into WinLame.