LAME 3.98.2

Rated 50/50 by Ciolouse at May 1, 2008

Beta 8 is out since April 13 2008: * LAME now accepts a floating point value in the range [0,...,10[ as VBR quality setting, like -V5.678 * Found and fixed some suspicious code in additive masking calculation for VBR-NEW * bug-fix:experimental code was defaulted by accident for VBR-NEW * fix for some endianess problem on big-endian machines

Rated 50/50 by scious at May 8, 2008

Simply the best of its kind and free. There can be only 1 rating for it. If you are worried about AAC and the myriad of other formats out there, then if you want true high quality music there is only one format to encode to - FLAC.

Rated 40/50 by DudeBoyz at Oct 2, 2008

I've been very pleased with Lame over the years. I have used the 3.97 version extensively with Bonk Encoder (up to and including 1.0.7) and that has turned out to be an excellent combination. I only just upgraded to Bonk Encoder 1.0.9 and the included Lame v3.98.1 and do not have a large body of conversions to compare as of yet. I hope that these v3.98.x versions turn out to be just as good as v3.97 has been. I almost didn't upgrade to the latest Bonk Encoder because I was so pleased with 3.97, but I guess I can't live in the past forever... :) I need to go find some detailed CHANGELOGS for the 3.98 series. Maybe then I'll feel more at ease with the update. That said, in using the latest release (3.98.2) for sound comparison tests, I was unable to discern any changes to the sound quality when compared to previous versions. I tested music at 192 kbps, 44.1 kHz, 16 bit Stereo (classical, guitar and rock) and Audiobooks at 32 kbps, 22.05 kHz, 16 bit mono. Clarity seemed fine with some walkman-style headphones. High notes were good, music vocals were good, bass was good, spoken word was good. I'm glad that they are updating Lame and hope they keep working on it. I also hope that they don't get hammered with some sort of licensing / royalties lawsuit. I was a fan of the Fast Fraunhofer used in Music Match 4.5 and up and I guess I still am. It recorded music at 160 kbps and I could not tell the diff between it and 192 kbps Lame back then, and I still cannot. But all the new musical stuff I encode is at 192 kbps CBR LAME and I'm pleased with the result. I have not done any VBR tests, however, since I do not encode using that method. I also use standard Stereo instead of Joint Stereo. Given that, I may not be testing Lame to its full potential, but for the way I like to use an encoder, it does a great job.

Rated 50/50 by Undesired Username at Oct 2, 2008

Awesome encoder. You can keep OGG and WMA, thank you very much. I did some ABX testing with foobar2000 using LAME, and was surprised to find how much compression I could squeeze into an MP3 file and still not be able to distinguish it from the huge APE files I've been using for years.

Rated 50/50 by spacemarine at Oct 2, 2008

LAME is unarguably the best MP3 encoder (by far). A lot of work has gone into the 3.98 release, making the best even better. Highly recommended!

Rated 50/50 by pedromoreno at Oct 3, 2008

Quit badmouthing ogg!!! It's not widely supported because most companies are plain stupid, period. Open source rules! Always will! As for LAME, lol, it's great! Mp3 has come a long way since its birth, and LAME is an excellent encoder.

Rated 50/50 by roj at Oct 3, 2008

pedromoreno: Face a few realities. Ogg is an expensive codec in terms of player resources and in the face of the ubiquitous mp3 is a non-essential nice-to-have codec to support. In addition, it offers no advantages in sound quality due to the advances LAME has undergone over the years. Let me see: Should I as a company support a format that relatively few people use (albeit a shrill minority) or should I dedicate machine resources and OS storage space to a codec that is everywhere. BZZZZZZZZTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!! ogg loses every time - a simple business decision. cowgaR : aac falls into the same category, albeit less so. The reality that is (and will continue to be) is that open source audio codcs (and aac) are a distinct minority in terms of practical market share. And few care. That's it, that's all. FIVE stars for an encoder that continues to improve and guarantees that mp3 will continue to be the dominant standard for the foreseeable future. EDIT: If you're running one of the old 32bit Semprons, make sure you add --noasm mmx --noasm sse to your command line. If you don't, you'll crash LAME with the following error: Faulting application lame.exe, version 0.0.0.0, faulting module lame.exe, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x0001967a. Damned intel garbage... :) :) ;)

Rated 50/50 by kholdstare at Oct 3, 2008

good to see LAME still being updated and the mp3 format is still alive and well with almost all media players being able to play mp3's and only some only being able to play AAC format. MP3 may be old and outdated but it is still the most wildly used format than any others

Rated 10/50 by cowgaR at Oct 3, 2008

@roj: I agree with you completely, but still can't find a device that can't play AAC. Maybe some obscure ones. It is due to APPLE and iPods that AAC gained great popularity and APPLE began selling music only in AAC. And in _many_ test I have seen (I can give you links) AAC crushed mp3 easily...in any bitrate, not to mention it is newer encoding tech than mp3, and I like its decoders philosophy better (same everywhere) than to look for players which can handle quality mp3 decoding (fault of mp3 format). @pedromoreno: OGG is great although I like AAC more (obviously;-), but it is not about liking a technology. I LOVED HD-DVD, it was superior to blu ray in many ways! But it died. Logicaly no support, so we have blu-ray. Why stick with format that has had its chance to be adopted and is still ignored? Die, free the market. @kholdstare: please name ONE player that can't play AAC nowadays, you must be on win95 ----------- best mp3 encoder...but deprecated, with no future ppl, start using AAC encoders (or AAC+ for lower bitrates) as they provide tens of advantages over mp3 format (tens of features supported, smaller size, not dependant on decoder quality unlike mp3, and tens of other things) and unlike ogg (which should die long ago) AAC is supported everywhere, from mobile phones to mp3 players and car receivers (again, unlike ogg) so if I want lose compression, I choose AAC encoder (probably iTunes one prefered more than Nero's one now) otherwise I'll stick with any loseless format mp3 is dead long time now, I wonder no-body noticed it, well APPLE did ;)

Rated 50/50 by cricri_pingouin at Oct 3, 2008

Best? I don't know, I don't know other encoders enough to state this. But it works great, and for free. So it gets a 5 from me.

Rated 50/50 by TuNk77 at Oct 3, 2008

• LAME 3.98.2 release is a maintenance release over 3.98. - build system related: some fixes for mp3rtp and abx tools - encoder padding values were not correct when resampling was involved - frequency filtering API was broken; in case you want to use your own higher quality filtering method, it is now possible again to disable LAME buildin filters - ID3 tagging: --id3v1-only switch did not work anymore, fixed --tg improved, now it matches more often one of the ID3v1 genres, even when small spelling errors are involved --add-id3v2-size is a new switch, it allows to define your own padding of n bytes. NOTE: Version 3.98.1 contains a bug that will let it crash when encoding CBR/ABR or with old VBR at setting q0, q1 or q2! The best mp3 encoder :D

Rated 50/50 by teranova52 at Oct 10, 2008

People forget the codec wars ... We are all free to choose from so many out there. About this codec , i use it for years with the old free Plextor tools. This is an win version with graphical interface , thats good for people that likes easy ways to do this task .

Rated 50/50 by digitalking at Nov 7, 2008

Creative Zen Vision:M which at one time was Creative's most popular MP3 player, does not play AAC, and this product is only 2-3 years old! Sorry some of us aren't spoiled brats and can't buy new audio/video player each year. http://us.creative.com/p...product=14331&nav=1

Rated 50/50 by darth at Nov 20, 2009

Kudos, LAME is one of best projects ever, one with the widest impact on the digital life of everyone!

Rated 20/50 by trents at Nov 25, 2010

HI, I agree with that it is really good tools to used...Try it and you will see the result...

Rated 40/50 by johnk119 at Aug 26, 2011

This program lacks support for lossless encoding which is not difficult to add. Basically I want to losslessly back up my music using as little space as possible... This is a half way useful program if you want to lose music quality