I'm working on integrating libmad with a game engine, and I've got a few questions. I'm new to MAD and mp3 decoding in general, so I apologize in advance for any newbie questions.

In scanning through the mad-dev archives, I read that FPM_DEFAULT produces slow and not very accurate decoding whereas FPM_INTEL is fast and accurate, but the provided msvc project file uses FPM_DEFAULT. Is this because FPM_INTEL assumes gcc and uses gcc-specific extensions? Is there any way to use something faster than FPM_DEFAULT in VC? I'm very concerned with speed because I'll need to use lazy decoding to ensure smooth frame rates.

I initially used mpglib (a subsection of mpg123) for this project of mine, and got the lazy decoding working nicely when I discovered that mpglib doesn't support joint stereo. Does libmad fully support joint stereo, intensive stereo, and VBR?

Thanks very much,

Chris Dellario