BladeEnc is based on the same ISO compression routines as mpegEnc, so you can expect roughly the same, or better, quality . The main difference is the appearance and speed. BladeEnc doesn't have a nice, user-friendly interface like mpegEnc, but it is more than three times faster, and it works with several popular front-end graphical user interfaces.

• Sourcecode available under the LGPL-license from the BladeEnc home page
• Reads standard WAV- and AIFF-files
• Commandline based, makes it easy to include BladeEnc into BAT files and shell scripts
• Batch encoding. Can encode any number of samples in a row
• Wildcards supported. You can for example encode all WAV-files in a directory by typing "*.WAV"
• Stereo or Mono output. Can downmix to Mono on the fly
• Supports the following bitrates: 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 and 320 kBit/s
• Flags like Private, Original and Copyright can be set
• Input sample can be automatically deleted after encoding
• Input samples can be in either 32, 44.1 or 48 kHz
• Both 8 and 16-bit samples are supported
• Large selection of graphical frontends available
• Task priority can be set from the commandline and is by default set to LOWEST so that you still can use your computer effectively while encoding (Windows & OS/2 only)
• Working CRC checksum generation (since 0.80). The ISO reference code had broken CRC calculations, which has been inherited into every ISO based encoder that haven't added a fix for it
• Full support for pipes and redirection (stdin and stdout)