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Notice: This program is PowerPC only and will not work with Lion 10.7
or any later version of Mac OS X.
LAMEVMX: LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder with VMX
LAMEVMX is a highly PowerPC-optimized build of the LAME MP3 encoder, version 3.100.
It is largely based
on tmkk's AltiVec/SSE
Optimized LAME Encoder with the following changes:
- PowerPC-only
- Restored compatibility with Mac OS X 10.4 (works on 10.5 too)
- Additional tweaks for G5
- Compiler-tuned per architecture
- Unified build system
The executable binary (698K, gzipped)
is three-headed and selects the proper version for G3, G4 and G5
systems. The G3 version obviously doesn't have AltiVec, but is an optimized
and tuned build for that platform. The G5 version has additional optimizations
for the PowerPC 970. Run the binary with no arguments to see the selected
version. It runs on Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. To use, just decompress it
and chmod +x.
With Energy Saver set to Highest Performance, my Tiger-based Quad G5
achieves 25x playback speed and up (peaks at around 30x under -V1).
The non-AltiVec version only benches at around 8x.
Although this version of LAME could probably be ported to POWER6 and later,
which has built-in AltiVec (and later chips have VSX), these chips are better
served by compiling with the built-in gcc intrinsics
(more details) and
this is how I run LAME on my own POWER9. However, this version is probably
the best approach for 32-bit PowerPC systems, especially those that cannot
run a sufficiently recent compiler, and because it is hand-tuned is probably
perceptibly faster on these less powerful systems.
Source code is available from
the repo on Github.
Cameron Kaiser