Sometimes computing axioms get started that no-one bothers to go and check, or recheck, later on. They just get repeated parrot-style over and over until everyone believes it. A bit like religion.
One of these axioms is “The iTunes MP3 encoder sucks. Use LAME instead, it’s better.”
Well, thanks to the efforts of Sebastian Mares, who organised a mass listening test of various MP3 encoders at 128K, we now know that this is in fact, not true.
You can read the detailed results for yourself here, but the short version is that iTunes, LAME, Fraunhofer, and Helix, all perform near identically and all sound excellent. LAME was in fact the slowest of these four, although encoding speed isn’t usually an important distinction.
So the next time you want to jump through hoops to avoid using the iTunes MP3 encoder – don’t bother. It’s just as good as LAME.
