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README_Amiga
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1986-05-31
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Hello and welcome to the BladeEnc Amiga-WarpOS port.
This is a short Amiga-specific note for the port.
There are two executables, "BladeEnc" that is compiled with StormGCC and
"BladeEnc_VBCC" compiled using VBCC 0.7f. The latter is about 0.10x slower, but
has stack-extension enabled (see below for stack considerations).
BladeEnc WarpOS has been compiled to work with powerpc.library V 15.0 in mind
(WarpOS 4). Don't try to run it on an older version - you've been warned.
WarpOS 5 (delivered with OS 3.9) is fine, of course.
Very important: BladeEnc needs a stack larger than the usual default. A stack
of at least 20000 bytes must be used to run BladeEnc. So check with the shell
if the stack is big enough (use the WarpOS command "stackppc").
The priority is set by default at 0 (the average priority for WarpOS, just like
AmigaOS), but you can change this value as you like. You can use the usual
BladeEnc keywords (HIGHEST, HIGHER, etc..) or just supply an absolute value,
like "-prio=4".
Amiga-specific patterns are fully supported on the commandline, so you can
specify things like "Track[0-9]", or any other combination understood by the
usual AmigaDos pattern-matching routines.
The configuration file, called "BladeEnc.cfg" can be placed either in
BladeEnc's directory, or in ENV: .
The supported input formats are AIFF stereo and WAV. If you use AsimCDFS to
extract the tracks from the CD, select the files in directory "AIFF_Stereo",
but please remember that BladeEnc tries to save in the same directory, so you
must supply a different destination ("-outdir=<your MP3 directory>"). However,
please note well: BladeEnc strips the file extensions off from the source files
and adds the ".mp3" extension. Since ASIM names the unnamed tracks as "Track.nn"
(where 'nn' is the tracknumber), all the files will be overwritten under the
name "Track.mp3". So rename the tracks before beginning. This may change in the
future versions.
This is not Amiga specific but very important: BladeEnc is targeted towards high
quality encoding. So please use it always with a bitrate of 160Kbits ("-160"),
or better 192Kbits. It's not really worth using it at 128Kbits.
SPEED NOTES:
BladeEnc is quite fast already, but to get the best from the encoder, you should
keep in mind that BladeEnc (like any other WarpOS program) is slowed down by
context-switches. So, in order to speed up encoding, try this:
1) leave a lot of memory free for BladeEnc to operate. This version uses some
intelligent buffer-allocation techniques; the biggest the I/O buffer is, the
faster the encoding goes. The buffer memory is allocated by taking the total
free memory and dividing by 4. So if you've 40 Mb free, BladeEnc will allocate
10 Mb for reading the source file.
2) Disable progress-indication ("-progress=0"). The progress indication used by
BladeEnc is really very expensive in terms of context switches, so disabling it
makes a real difference. On the development machine, the difference was of about
25% !! NOTE: due to a compiler limitation, when progress indication is disabled
you won't be able to stop BladeEnc using Control-C. This may change in the
future.
3) Don't rip and encode at the same time; if you've AsimCDFS, that lets you
extract tracks from CD just by reading the relative file, FIRST copy all the
necessary files on your harddisk, and THEN start encoding!
Seeing from tests done by betatesters, BladeEnc WarpOS is faster than LAME, and
a bit slower than NCodeR. But you've to keep in mind that BladeEnc is targeted
towards high-quality encoding rather than speed. Anyway, if you're not yet
satisfied, please know that NCodeR encoding time is calculated after much of the
file is loaded in memory, while BladeEnc "streams" the audio file, both when
reading and writing, so time is calculated since the input and output files are
first opened.
Have fun!
Port author:
Andrea Vallinotto <avallino@diff.org>
Updates can be found at: http://www.diff.org/avallino
Many thanks to:
Frank Wille
Thanks must also go to:
Juergen Haage
Martin Steigerwald
Cinzia Rutigliano
Pietro Leone