Mike Cheng eventually left leadership and started working on tooLAME (an MP2 encoder). The project quickly became a team project.

That branch (a patch against the reference sources) became Lame 2.0. His goal was only to speed up the dist10 sources, and leave its quality untouched. After some quality concerns raised by others, he decided to start again from scratch based on the 'dist10' MPEG reference software sources. Īround mid-1998, Mike Cheng created LAME 1.0 as a set of modifications against the '8Hz-MP3' encoder source code. The name LAME is a recursive acronym for ' LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder'. LAME is now bundled with Audacity, which previously required a separate download for LAME. This avoided including LAME itself, which use patented techniques, and so required patent licenses in some countries. LAME was required by some programs released as free software in which LAME was linked for MP3 support, but the patent has expired. The LAME encoder outperforms early encoders like 元enc and possibly the 'gold standard encoder' MP3enc, both marketed by Fraunhofer. LAME is a free software project that was first released in 1998, and has incorporated many improvements since then, including an improved psychoacoustic model.

LAME is a software encoder that converts digital audio into the MP3 Audio coding format.

Audacity mp3 plugin