The development of BladeEnc was officially discontinued.

BladeEnc is a freeware MP3 encoder. It is based on the same ISO compression routines as mpegEnc, so you can expect roughly the same, or better, quality . The main difference is the appearance and speed. BladeEnc doesn't have a nice, user-friendly interface like mpegEnc, but it is more than three times faster, and it works with several popular front-end graphical user interfaces.

Features common for both BladeEnc.dll and BladeEnc.exe :

- Sourcecode available under the LGPL-license!
- Stereo or Mono output. Can downmix to Mono on the fly.
- Supports the following bitrates: 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 and 320 kBit/s. However, for bitrates lower than 128 kBit we seriously recommend you to use another encoder.
- Flags like Private, Original and Copyright can be set.
- Input samples can be in either 32, 44.1 or 48 kHz.
- Both 8 and 16-bit samples are supported.
- Working CRC checksum generation (since 0.80). The ISO reference code had broken CRC calculations, which has been inherited into every ISO based encoder that haven't added a fix for it.

Features specific to BladeEnc.DLL :

- Can be plugged directly into many popular 3rd party products, giving them integrated mp3 encoding abilities.
- Encodes chunks of data from memory to memory, no need to use files or pipes.

Features specific to BladeEnc.exe :

- Can be compiled for nearly any operating system still in use.
- Commandline based, makes it easy to include BladeEnc into BAT files and shell scripts.
- Only mp3 encoder that supports gapless encoding.
- Reads standard uncompressed WAV- and AIFF-files as well as well as RAW PCM-data.
- Batch encoding. Can encode any number of samples in a row.
- Wildcards supported. You can for example encode all WAV-files in a directory by typing "*.WAV".
- Input samples can be automatically deleted after encoding.
- Large selection of graphical frontends available.
-Task priority can be set from the commandline and is by default set to LOWEST so that you still can use your computer effectively while encoding (Windows & OS/2 only).
- Full support for pipes and redirection (stdin and stdout).
- Textbased configuration file where you can change default settings.

Changes in BladeEnc 0.94.2 :

- Bugfix: The very uncommon crash on certain WAV files has now been fixed again has been verified to work properly (Andre).
- Modified FFT calculations. Produces the same output and should be slightly faster. However it seems to produce a slight speed decrease (about 1%) on Tord's computer so any comparisons would be appreciated (Andre).