Supporting Products

Here follows an incomplete listing of programs that supports or uses BladeEnc
for mp3 compression.

We used to have a much nicer listing with screenshots and everything, but that
simply took too much time and effort to keep up to date. Hopefully this shall
stay a bit more current.

If you find some errors or would like to add some products, please send an e-mail.

Windows Frontends for BladeEnc.exe

- AutoBlade by Nick Ryan is a frontend that supports Batch encoding and Drag'n Drop and can power down your computer after encoding.
- BEShell by XeT Software was the first frontend written for BladeEnc. It supports Batch encoding and Drag'n Drop like most other frontends.
- BladeBatch is a very sophisticated and feature filled frontend by Eugene Loginov with loads of features. It totally hides away BladeEnc and provides its own progress indicator, making it look and feel more like an encoder on its own than just a frontend. Supports everything like Batch Encoding (where you even can edit the batch while encoding!), Drag'n Drop, power down after encoding etc.
- BladeEnc Helper by Shawn Andersson is another good frontend. It has all the usual features like Batch Encoding and Drag'n Drop and as an original feature it can do an recursive search of directories for audio files to encode.
- DistributeEnc is a frontend by Klaasjan te Voortwis which is meant for distributed encoding over a network using a server/client model. It distributes the different files from the batch to all the clients it can find and thus lets you encode multiple files quickly without setting up a number of computers individually.
- FrontBlade by SoftechSoftware is a feature filled frontend with a lot of features. Batch Encoding, Drag'n Drop, Shutdown computer after encoding and ID3 tagging. It can both hide away BladeEnc (like BladeBatch) or run BladeEnc openly.
- RazorBlade is a feature filled frontend by Holger Dors that (like BladeBatch) hides away BladeEnc and provides its own progress indicator etc. It has loads of features like Batch Encoding, Drag'n Drop, Shutdown computer after encoding, Minimize to tray and can do an automatic online check for new versions.
- Twilight by Night DreamZz is a small and easy to use frontend. It has deliberately a minimal selection of options as to not confuse the user and supports Batch Encoding.
- Distributed MP3 by Bhanu Mittal is a Java based frontend for Windows that does distributed mp3 encoding.

Windows Frontends for BladeEnc.dll

- Mp3NetEnc is a frontend by ZoombyWoof that both works as a normal one-machine frontend and can handle distributed encoding of batches over multiple machines running Mp3NetEnc.

Windows CD Rippers that supports BladeEnc.exe and/or BladeEnc.dll

- Audiograbber by Jackie is one of the most popular CD Rippers for Windows. Commercial product that requires registration.
- CD-Copy by Markus Barth is mainly a CD-Ripper but is extremely feature filled and includes everything you need for ripping, encoding, naming tracks, ID3 tagging, print sleeves and cut your own CDs. The sheer number of features and slightly confusing layout might make it a bit hard to get used to though. Commercial product that requires registration.
- CDex is a completely free, Open Source encoder by Albert Faber. It has its own built in mp3 encoder, but also supports BladeEnc.
- Easy CD-DA Extractor 3 is a good and feature filled CD Ripper by Jukka Poikolainen who originally wrote the BladeEnc DLL-wrapper. Commercial product that requires registration.
- Exact Audio Copy (EAC) by Andre Wiethoff is a freeware CD Ripper that should be THE CHOICE if you take quality seriously. It has special algorithms for making sure that no jitter, skips or other errors gets through and if it can't be avoided, it does its best to hide them and reports any suspicious song positions. The drawback of this is that it has to read each sector at least twice and sometimes much more if it's a badly scratch record making the ripping process anything from between twice as slow (normal) to taking hours (very uncommon).
- CD 'n' Go! is a freeware CD Ripper by Jose Mejuto. Supports most important things like CDDB and ID3, but I dont' know so much more about it.
- AKRip by Andy Key is a free, Open Source (GPL) commandline based CD Ripper that just like BladeEnc doesn't have any graphical interface, but can be run from the DOS-Prompt or batch scripts. Comes with complete source code.
- CD-DAX-Tractor is also by Andy Key and the GUI counterpart of AKRip. It's completely free, Open Source (GPL).
- RosoftCD Extractor is a feature filled CD Ripper that can use BladeEnc.exe or any other commandline based mp3 encoder for encoding. Available both as adware and part of the commercial package Rosoft Audio Tools.
- RipTrax by John C. Lundy is a free Windows CD Ripper. RipTrax claims to be the first known CD Ripper to provide access to the C2 Error codes which are output by most CD drives to display ripped image quality. This should provide the user with a clear visual indication of audio distortion; or lack of it. RipTrax also supports CDDB queries and ID3 tags.

Windows Audio Editors and Music Tools

- WavePurity by SensoLogic GmbH is an Audio Restauration Software Package that uses BladeEnc for mp3 encoding.
- MP3 Observer is an easy to use and fast all-in-one MP3 file-manager, encoder, ID3 tag editor, playlist creator, CD-archiving tool and MP3-player.
- Total Recorder by High Criteria is a program that can capture audio from nearly every program or device by emulating a sound card. Can use BladeEnc.dll for mp3 encoding. Shareware, 40 seconds of recording without registration.
- Feurio by Jens Fangmeier is in the authors own words "an integrated program for creating audio-CDs" It contains a CD ripper, a CD-database with CDDB-support, a CD- and wave-player, a sample wave-editor and a CD-burning program. It's shareware, but the trial version is uncrippled and without time limitations.

Linux/UNIX Graphical Frontends

- Krabber by Adrian Schroeter is a GPL'ed, KDE based graphical frontend for CD Paranoia and BladeEnc (can also use other encoders).
- KBlade by Arnaud Rolly is a GPL'ed, KDE based graphical frontend for BladeEnc. Nice and straight forward and supports Drag'n Drop.
- Grip by Mike Oliphant is a GPL'ed, GTK based CD-Ripper, player and encoder. It has the functionality of CD Paranoia and LAME built in, but can also use external rippers and encoders, including BladeEnc. Lot of features and stuff like CDDB support, ID3 tagging etc.
- DAC2MP3 by Fredrik H Spång and Tom Olav Urstad is a GPL'ed frontend for cdparanoia and BladeEnc (can also use other encoders) written in Tcl/Tk.
- grip.e by Stephen Balukoff is GTK/entity front-end for ripping/encoding/tagging CD audio, based very roughly on grip. Released under the MIT license.
- GTKmp3make by Andrew Moenk is based on the original console mp3make, and adds a GTK GUI with simple controls. It uses the CDDB database for track rip selection and naming of the MP3s, and supports cdparanoia and cdda2wav for CDDA->wav.

Linux/UNIX Console Frontends

- cdr by Mike Hardy is a GPL'ed perl script. cdr stands for create/duplicate/rip and is a console based frontend for ripping/encoding/decoding/cutting. It uses dialog to provide an ncurses interface.
- ripEnc by Michael J. Parmeley is a GPL'ed bourne shell script frontend to Cdparanoia, cdda2wav, tosha and Bladeenc, 8hz-mp3, l3enc. It utilizes CDDB lookups to automate the naming of songs as they are ripped. A manual naming option is also available. The entire CD can be ripped or you can pick the songs to rip.
- ripit by Simon Quinn is a small front-end program written in perl for ripping, encoding & tagging MP3s. It is a console program that needs no user intervention. It requires cdparanoia, bladeenc and xmcd (for CDDB access).
- 123MP3 by Brett Nuske is a frontend to BladeEnc and CDDA2WAV that produces MP3s from selected tracks on a CD in one automated process.
- BladeWrapper by Claudio Matsuoka is a very simple public domain C wrapper that handles terminal I/O and allows bladeenc to run in background, which can be useful to encode a large batch of files. Progress and ETA are reported in the process name and can be checked using ps(1). Verbose output is enabled when the process runs in foreground.

Other Software

- BeOS, the media OS by BeInc uses BladeEnc as of version 5 Pro (Personal doesn't) to provide system wide mp3 encoding capabilities. Unfortunatelly is the version they are using (0.82) quite out of date now, so an update would be nice ;)