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. 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 8hz-MP3 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.
The project quickly became a team project. Mike Cheng eventually left leadership and started working on tooLame, an MP2 encoder. Mark Taylor became leader and started pursuing increased quality in addition to better speed. He can be considered the initiator of the LAME project in its current form. He released version 3.0 featuring gpsycho, a new psychoacoustic model he developed.
In early 2003 Mark left project leadership, and since then the project has been lead through the cooperation of the active developers (currently 4 individuals).
Links where the latest compiled binaries are always available:
http://lame.sourceforge.net/links.php#Binaries
http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundle.php
Comments and Reviews
I tried every possible configuration and ripped my CD collection over and over with different settings. After all this years I suddenly became aware that LAME is very easy to configure:
lame -V2 input.wav output.mp3
That's it. "-V2" produces ˜190 kbs with so much quality that its impossible to tell input from output. This is tantamount to Banshee's quality setting VBR 7.