lame: How could I have forgotten this?

Somehow I managed to work my way through 20 months of console programs — usually on a two-a-day basis — and still not mention lame.

That’s unacceptable, considering I can remember lame from as far back as 1999 or maybe even earlier. Back then I was stuck using Xing‘s Audio Catalyst to convert CDs to mp3s, and a friend laughed and said, “Get lame.”

Fifteen years have not obsoleted lame, and for what I can remember, it still works just as well. And there’s even more reason to love it now, with that beautiful real-time animated conversion statistics graph. K.Mandla likes. … 😀

It might be presumptuous for me to offer suggestions on how to use a program that has been around since 1998 and reached such a widespread audience. It’s even more presumptuous because lame has help pages as long as your arm, covering everything from variable bitrate encoding to filter cutoffs to id3 tagging options. For any tweak I could offer, lame has about 20 variations.

I will be honest and say I don’t use lame much any more, since most tools I see incorporate other encoding tools, or rip straight from audio to mp3/ogg. It’s rare that I see a wav file that needs conversion. 😦 And if I must be absolutely candid, I haven’t ripped a CD to mp3 in years.

Perhaps that too is a sign of our evolution, over the last 15 years.