

LAME is not a patch anymore, but a full encoder.

June 1999 (LAME 3.11): The first variable bitrate (VBR) implementation is released.May 1999 (LAME 3.0): a new psychoacoustic model (GPSYCHO) is released.A few key improvements since LAME 3.x, in chronological order: Mark Taylor then started pursuing increased quality in addition to better speed, and released version 3.0 featuring gpsycho, a new psychoacoustic model he developed. 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".
