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After almost 2 years of developing and 8 beta versions new LAME 3.98 Final was released. Highlights from changelog:

  • LAME now has its own psy model, a derivation from NSPSY
  • LAME now accepts a floating point value in the range [0,...,10] as VBR quality setting, like -V5.678
  • Ability to set user-defined ID3v2.3 frame and include albumArt in ID3v2.3 tag
  • The newer VBR code is now LAME's default VBR routine

More - changelog

Source - lame-398.tar.gz

Website - www.mp3dev.org

Binaries - windows, debian, osx

Source

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here is windows version (which will work with EAC etc)...

http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Lame_Encoder.htm

p.s. overall though since i got my DAP (Digital Audio Player) Sandisk Sansa e250 (2GB) v1 player i usually use .OGG format now as it's much better sounding at lower bit rates (i.e. under 128kbps) than MP3's are.... im running rockbox (www.rockbox.org , free open-source firmware) on my player now and it's great. rockbox even has little games on it to like solitaire and even can run the original DooM game for the pc on it, although i never tried running it on mine yet.

Edited by ThaCrip
true with the price in hard drives who cant pass up flac

I pass it up. It's not a storage issue so much as it is one of battery conservation on portal devices. The times I've played around re-ripping my library in different codecs I've noticed considerable battery life differences in favour of the smaller files. Still need good quality mind but at the same time I try to keep it balanced too.

That and MP3 is simply more universally supported. It's the reason I swapped from WMA and never touched Ogg. I tend to prefer not to have to rerip my library when I get a new device or be stuck with a smaller range of devices because I chose a more niche format.

Not dissing FLAC but, great format. But there is reasons to go MP3 or other ones too and storage isn't the only issue.

But they don't have unlimited hard disk space. :D

FLAC is still very handy in a temporary sense.

If there's a band I really like and I want the highest quality rip, I download their album in FLAC from a newsgroup, and then convert to mp3 with Lame using the V1 quality preset. Then I transfer it to my music player and keep the mp3s on a portable hard drive. Then, I just delete the FLAC files.

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