GPA wrote:

but i just cannot make LAME work in win'95 on 386.

Well, what happens when you try it? What are you trying, specifically – some sort of LAME executable, or something that uses the LAME DLL? I reckon the problem might be the use of MMX instructions.

Way back in the day, the "Radium" MP3 codec was the way to go.

Audiograbber http://www.audiograbber.org/ is a piece of freeware (it wasn't always freeware, I actually paid the shareware fee for it back in the day) that I used very successfully on W95 and W98 for years. It even works in W7 IIRC. It can use its own internal encoder, or a variety of external encoders. Works beautifully with LAME dll. Never tried it on a 386, but worked fine on 486 so I don't see why it wouldn't.

i think its better known as fraunhofer

xvid and ffmpeg used to have different executables that supported specific sets of instructions. Also, you could try to compile ffmpeg with support for your CPU.

Thank you very much for your help,

When i tried LAME executables, even the oldest version that i was able to find did not work, they were either crashing the system that otherwise was very stable, or were displaying a message that the program required older version of Windows.

Audacity requires a dll from LAME to encode MP3s, and the oldest version of that dll that i was able to find still crashed.

Unfortunately, i have not tools to build binaries from source code so that will not work for me at this point.

Thank you very much for all other suggestions, i am going to try them out later this week.

GPA wrote:

they were either crashing the system that otherwise was very stable

As in, blue screen of death? Did the BSOD provide a filename?

If Audiograbber doesn't work for you that I'd have to say there's something wrong with your system. That's the most compatible Cd ripper/MP3 encoder that I know of.

an mp3 codec does not touch hardware, hence i cant really believe that hardware is so stable. maybe check it with high load?

Audiograbber worked! Thanks very much.
In fact, the latest version no longer supports Windows 95, but i managed to find an older version that worked well.

As for the system stability, i am pretty sure in it - i have ran quite a few benchmarks, and even Q2 timedemo runs with no issues. SuperPi was running almost all night long with no issues as well. Well, of course, i cannot rule out everything, but i still blame LAME dll build to be incompatible with either Windows 95 or the 386 processor.

There is no BSOD when using LAME dll, Audacity lets me chose parameters for the MP3 compression and when starting the process it crashes, displaying "This program has performed illegal operation and will be closed" window.

When saving to ogg vorbis format (audacity doesn't require anything external for that), everything works fine.

I have managed to find old versions of ffmpeg and xvid codecs, will test them out too.

Thank you everybody for your help.