When you send your music out into the digital world you want it to sound as good as possible. Although there any many digital formats available to distribute your music, none are as ubiquitous as the so-called “inferior” MP3. Newer formats include Apple’s AAC (as used in iTunes) and Microsoft’s WMA files. Both create better sounding files at smaller sizes, but you can’t play a WMA file on an iPod, or an AAC on a Zune. This is where LAME comes in.
LAME is not an MP3 encoder itself, but the “back end” of the encoding system. From the LAME website:
LAME is an educational tool to be used for learning about MP3 encoding. The goal of the LAME project is to use the open source model to improve the psycho acoustics, noise shaping and speed of MP3. LAME is not for everyone – it is distributed as source code only and requires the ability to use a C compiler.
Blah, blah, blah… You don’t have to be programmer to reap the rewards that LAME encoding can bring to your MP3s. There are many free open source applications for Windows and Mac OS that use the LAME engine. There are also many commercial products that use LAME. Find a list of applications that use LAME here.
I use LameBrain. It hasn’t been updated since 2003, and it never made it to version 1 (I’ve got version 0.6.2b3) but it makes noticeably better sounding MP3s than iTunes. (And the app icon is an image of Skeletor, so it makes me feel powerful and sinister.) Not everyone has an iPod, and Windows Media Player isn’t available for Mac, so MP3 is still the best option for mass digital distribution. And using a LAME MP3 encoder is the best way to get the most out of this “old” format. -mc
