EncSpot was an application produced by the now apparently-dead GuerillaSoft that printed technical information about MP3s and tried to guess which MP3 encoder was used to create them. Although accuracy varies depending on encoder, other useful information EncSpot will display is a histogram of bitrate distributions of VBR MP3s and the contents of the LAME header (if present).

One of the last things GuerillaSoft did was to release the console version of EncSpot under a New BSD license. Adapting the code to compile under Linux is reasonably trivial so I've created a Linux version here. Differences from the original code include.

• CMake based build system (allows compiling under Windows as well).
• Build scripts for producing .deb packages for Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives.
• Various fixes including multiple potential buffer overflows.
• Allocates large buffers on the heap instead of the stack.
• General code cleanup and adaptation for compiling with g++ under *nix.

Original Windows source and binary released by GuerillaSoft:

EncSpot_Console_2.01.zip

EncSpot_Console_2.01.zip.sig (OpenPGP Signature)

Updated source (no binary) for Windows & Linux:

encspot-2.01+mtn20110729.tar.bz2

encspot-2.01+mtn20110729.tar.bz2.sig (OpenPGP Signature)

Ubuntu Personal Package Archive (will install under Debian too):

https://launchpad.net/~francis-russell/+archive/encspot

EncSpot example output:

$ encspot Moby\ -\ Porcelain.mp3 
Moby - Porcelain.mp3
--------------------

Bitrates:
------------------------------------------------------------
 32                                                     0.9%
 80                                                     0.0%
 96                                                     0.4%
112     |||                                             3.7%
128     ||||||||||                                     11.8%
160     ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||       43.3%
192     ||||||||||||||||||||||||||                     29.1%
224     |||||                                           5.7%
256     ||                                              3.1%
320     |                                               1.9%
------------------------------------------------------------

Type                : mpeg 1 layer III
Bitrate             : 171
Mode                : joint stereo
Frequency           : 44100 Hz
Frames              : 9242
Length              : 00:04:01
Max. Reservoir      : 476
Av. Reservoir       : 54
Emphasis            : none
Scalefac            : 2.1%
Bad Last Frame      : no
Encoder             : Lame 3.98

Lame Header:

Quality                       : 80
Version String                : Lame 3.98
Tag Revision                  : 0
VBR Method                    : vbr-mtrh
Lowpass Filter                : 18500
Psycho-acoustic Model         : nspsytune
Safe Joint Stereo             : yes
nogap (continued)             : no
nogap (continuation)          : no
ATH Type                      : 4
ABR Bitrate                   : 32
Noise Shaping                 : 1
Stereo Mode                   : Joint Stereo
Unwise Settings Used          : no
Input Frequency               : 44.1kHz

--[ EncSpot Console 2.0 ]--[ http://www.guerillasoft.com ]--