Well, did some benchmarks with this new 3.93-release.
BUT my opinion didn't change because my results were very clearly:
MJ with Lame 3.93 creating CBR 160 kbit : 11x speed
MJ with Lame 3.93 creating VBR 1: 5x speed
CD'n'Go with on-the-fly Xing VBR 100: 30X SPEED!!!!!!!!!!
You see what I mean!?!
And as I already wrote, this is not a quality discussion, nobody is pressed to use Xing, but in fact all those objective tests are no good for a lossy codec like mp3, only thing that counts is subjective quality, and a very well known magazine, c't, showed up some time ago, that Xing is not good on CBR, but best on VBR mp3s, since they invented vbr!!! And they were right, have a look at all new codecs, everyone is using vbr, even new wma9 (although this is really crap)
And I guess that the whole plugin-engine of MJ is based on the idea to support as much as possible without getting a very big tool that needs to be rewritten & updated for every change. So why not enhance capabilities of MJ with this downloadable plugin?
I would be very sad if this plugin has no future just for the fact that some people don't like xing. I for example don't like VQF, but I don't argue about the fact that there is a MJ-plugin for VQF.
To be honest, I think that Ogg is the future, in last c't ogg beats all other competitors, but my Expanium-Discman can only read MP3s that's why I ask for that plug-in.
Cheers
Raist