Encspot Documentation (preliminary version)

(Last updated 23rd June 2001)

This is a brief explanation of some of the features of Encspot. More comprehensive documentation (with better markup) might follow in the future.

Links

For background information about the technical aspects of mp3 encoding, some possible sources are

  • The Fraunhofer Institute
  • Sample chapter from MP3: The definitive guide by Scot Hacker
  • MP3-Tech
  • The LAME homepage.


    • Available columns

    By pressing Ctrl+P or selecting Options/Settings, you can customize the columns visible in the list.

  • Name - clear
  • Bitrate - average bitrate for the file
  • Type - usual mp3 is MPEG 1 layer III
  • Frames - minimum number of frames in the file. A + indicates that there are more frames. See the section on Settings/General below.
  • Stereo Mode - clear
  • Frequency - clear
  • Length - clear
  • Max reservoir - the largest number of reservoir bytes used by a frame (see the references above)
  • Size - clear
  • Quality - a rough determination of the quality of the file. Determined solely by the encoder used, the bitrate, and the stereo mode.
  • Encoder - a guess of the encoder used to encode the file. I emphasise this is a guess which may sometimes be wrong.
  • Complete - Whether a file is complete is determined by looking at the final frame - if all its bytes are not present, then the file is probably cut. However, some encoders always truncate the final frame for some reason. We put 'maybe' in this column if the file is truncated but it is not known whether the encoder always truncates files.

    Toolbar

    Encpsot does not monitor the filesystem continuously, but if you click the 'refresh' toolbar button, then the current folder will be rescanned.

    If you click the 'Stop' button then Encpsot will stop scanning the current folder (if a scan is in progress). This may be useful for incredibly large directories.

    Settings

    General

    In order to extract information from a file it is necessary to scan the frame headers of the file. This is a time consuming process. There is thus an option to limit the number of frames to read. A value of 1000 should give fairly accurate results but you should experiment.

    If Encspot is unable to determine the encoder with the given number of frames, it can scan the rest. Of course this may be time consuming, hence you have the option to enable this.

    Quality

    The clarity of an encoded file is clearly higher for mono files since twice the bits can be allocated to the single channel. However, if the source was stereo then the stereo separation has been lost. For the purposes of the 'Quality' column in the list you thus have the option of treating a mono file as a stereo file with twice the bitrate. E.g. a mono file at 64kbps can have the same quality value as a 128kbps stereo file (all other things being equal).

    Columns

    Covered above.

    Details Dialog

    If you double-click on a file, hit return, on right-click and select 'Details' you get the details dialog. This shows more technical information and graphs about the file. It is this information which is used to guess the encoder.

    If you click 'Copy Info' then the data will be copied to the clipboard. You can then for example paste it into a text editor.

    Shell Support

    Encpsot supports shell drag and drop.

  • Dragging a file onto Encpsot launches the Details Dialog.
  • Dragging a file out of Encpsot either moves or copies the file (like with Windows Explorer).
  • Right-clicking a file brings up the Explorer context menu.


    • Product Support

    There is none. Well, that's not true. You can email me at potsticker@guerillasoft.com, but I can't guarantee anything - it depends how busy I am. Remember I'm doing this for fun only.

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