Editing LAME (section)

== History ==
The name '''LAME''' is a [[recursive acronym]] for "LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder".<ref>{{cite web |title= LAME MP3 Encoder :: About |publisher= Lame.sourceforge.net |url=http://lame.sourceforge.net/about.php |access-date= 2012-03-17}}</ref>

Around mid-1998, Mike Cheng created LAME 1.0 as a set of modifications against the 8Hz-MP3 encoder source code. After some quality concerns were raised by others, he decided to start again from scratch based on the dist10 MPEG reference software sources. His goal was only to speed up the dist10 sources, and leave its quality untouched. That branch (a patch against the reference sources) became Lame 2.0. The project quickly became a team project. Mike Cheng eventually left leadership and started working on [[tooLAME]] (an MP2 encoder).<ref name=log/>

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. A few key improvements since LAME 3.x, in chronological order:<ref name=log>{{cite web |title=LAME Changelog |url=https://svn.code.sf.net/p/lame/svn/trunk/lame/doc/html/history.html |website=svn.code.sf.net}}</ref>
* May 1999 (LAME 3.0): a new psychoacoustic model (GPSYCHO) is released.
* June 1999 (LAME 3.11): The first [[variable bitrate]] (VBR) implementation is released. Soon after this, LAME also became able to target lower sampling frequencies from MPEG-2. (LAME 3.99 also supports the technologically simpler [[average bitrate]] (ABR), but it is unclear whether it was added before or with VBR.)
* November 1999 (LAME 3.52): LAME switches from a GPL license to an LGPL license, which allows using it with closed-source applications.
* May 2000 (LAME 3.81): the last pieces of the original ISO demonstration code are removed. LAME is not a patch anymore, but a full encoder.
* December 2003 (LAME 3.94): substantial improvement to default settings, along with improved speed. LAME no longer requires users to enter complicated parameters to produce good results.
* May 2007 (LAME 3.98): default variable bitrate encoding speed is vastly improved.