For some reason many people consider the Blade Encoder as a high quality MP3 compressor, while this is certainly not the case. Garbriel Bouvigne summarizes Blade's faults briefly (audiofora.com): -No lowpassing -wrong transcient detection -too late short block switching -bad reservoir handling -no joint stereo -non optimal huffman compression -a lot of bugs everywhere -wrong ath -bad best quantization selection -no scalefactor use -no scfsi Very technical stuff, but the point is that there is no reason AT ALL to use BladeEnc. The highest quality MP3 compressor at the moment is LAME MP3 Encoder. Especially in VBR modes it delivers outstanding quality. http://www.cd-rw.org/software/audio_software/audio_encoders/lame_mp3_encoder.cfm