Re: [Audacity-devel] BladeEnc API usage

[Richard A. <ri...@au...>]

On Sun, 2008-12-28 at 11:23 -0600, Leland wrote:
> Back in 2007, I'd brought up the question of why we use the BladeEnc API 
> on Windows and if we should still be using it.  Apparently I let the 
> conversation drop (or just forgot) because we're still using the 
> BladeEnc API.  This isn't a bad thing, but it does make the coding of 
> the MP3 exporter a bit more difficult for no apparent benefit.

Looking back at the previous discussion we seemed to get side-tracked
about Bladeenc support, which I think would be a total waste of time
(it's based on the same ISO dist-10 source and has had no work done on
it since 2001 - which pretty much makes it abandoned, as there is no
hope page or VCS either). So I would quite happily drop the support
(which we have never advertised or tested) from future releases and
clean up the code.

Whilst in similar vein, ExportMultiple has some windows-specific code
for using ToMPG.exe as an MP3 encoder that doesn't appear anywhere else
(i.e. is only usable for multiple exports). Given that we can now export
using any command line encoder on all platforms (which we couldn't when
this was added), can this also be quietly dropped in the future? Unless
anyone objects I'm likely to do this before the next release.

> The reason I bring it back up is because I need to modify the exporter 
> to correct the VBR encoding issue and it'll have to handled differently 
> between Windows and the rest.  Jettisoning the Blade code would make it 
> easier and we'd be able to have consistent encoding results between the 
> different environments.
> 
> Waiting to do the VBR fix...
Consistent results sounds like a very good reason to drop the Blade
support and at least only get one set of MP3 encoding issues not two.

Richard