Shine's output doesn't sound great. If you need the performance on embedded hardware, that's what it's there for. If you need quality sound and can't afford to crank up the output bitrate, prepare to be disappointed.
Exactly right. Due to the missing psycoacoustic model, Shine can't really compress well. Don't even bother with bitrates lower than 128kbps if you want your audio to sound decent. But exactly due to the lack of the psycoacoustic model, its very light on cpu and memory, and perfect for the specific embedded use cases where encoded bitrate is not a concern.
Shine's output doesn't sound great. If you need the performance on embedded hardware, that's what it's there for. If you need quality sound and can't afford to crank up the output bitrate, prepare to be disappointed.