I guess the title says it all. For the Mac there are many MP3 encoding programs, some are free and some are paid. Is there any quality difference among them? Any algorhythmical or code difference that can affect the end encoding quality?

Thanks a lot for your input.

Peace.

 

Most, if not all freeware, shareware and paid MP3 encoders out there use the LAME encoding libraries, which is open source, and has been approved by hydrogenaud.io forums a long, long time ago, as LAME surpassed Fraunhofer's own MP3 software in sound quality relatively quickly iirc.

Of course, some softwares might not offer all the parameters the LAME encoder has. On the other hand, some of the settings are rather advanced and might not be for everybody. Either way, I seriously doubt that anybody capable of making a frontend would leave out anything important, so basically, any soft that uses LAME 3.99x should be good enough.

Personally I use fre:ac for MP3 and FLAC.

 

Last edited: Mar 20, 2017

not really the answer you are looking for, but imo, if you are compressing down to MP3 then the subtle differences are not enough to worry about.
just keep things in WAV, or compress down to FLAC if you must compress.

 

Use LAME prior to 3.91 which lets you to turn off bandpass filter. Newer version have that option deprecated.
For all other uses, where compatibility isn't the primary concern, MP3 should be avoided.