Thank you for the reply - it did, however, give birth to a few more questions :-)
The whole reason behind seperating these two decoders are patent and license issues.
MP3 encoding and decoding requires you as a product developer to have a legal patent license which can be obtained by Thomson.
Would this be the case also if my application were to be released under GPL?
With version 2.3.0.1 there are now two versions of the bass.dll available:
a) the standard on in the main directory based on the BASS internal MP3 decoder
b) the on the 'mp3-free' directory which is using the Windows based MP3 decoder
Do you know of the differences between these two with respect to sound quality and performance?
I really want to avoid nasty mp3 side effects (flanger, weak transients etc.) by using the best available mp3-decoder. However, my application also needs to decode approx 15 streams at a time (!) - so speed is also on my mind (as the application will run on a "normal" consumer pc).
I think I'm gonna run a test both ways and see what I can learn from this, but if you have any experience in the differences between the two, it certainly would be nice to hear them upfront.