LAME is a high quality MPEG Audio Layer III (MP3) encoder licensed under the LGPL. It is considered the best MP3 encoder at mid-high bitrates and at VBR.
lame is a high quality mpeg audio layer iii (mp3) encoder licensed under the lgpl. it is considered the best mp3 encoder at midhigh bitrates and at vbr. both quality and speed improvements are still happening, probably making lame the only mp3 encoder still being actively developed.
mike cheng started it as a patch against the 8hzmp3 encoder sources. after some quality concerns raised by others, he decided to start from scratch based on the dist10 sources. his goal was only to speed up the dist10 sources, and leave its quality untouched. that branch (a patch against the reference sources) became lame 2.0, and only on lame 3.81 did we replaced of all dist10 code, making lame no more only a patch.
mp3 encoder audio-codecs audio-codec vbr