I remember having to download LAME binaries from South America, as recently as last month, and as long ago as 1999. And I also remember when it was just a patc

I remember having to download LAME binaries from South America, as recently as last month, and as long ago as 1999. And I also remember when it was just a patch to Fraunhofer's reference implementation, under a suspiciously shaky interpretation of the law. I remember doing a comparison test way back in the late 90s between an officially licensed MP3 encoder and LAME on the same set of music WAV files, and was simply blown away when I could actually hear a difference in the results. Being the sort of anti-audiophile that I am, I then reduced the bitrate of the LAME encoding until I could just barely tell that it was too low, so that I could cram more music onto my hard drive, make playlists, and record them at 1x speed through the line-out port to an audio cassette tape, for my car stereo. At the time, LAME made the smallest file sizes for the crap music quality that I tolerate. Nowadays, I encode at minimum of 96k/sec (sometimes better) just to annoy other people around me less, and to cut down on the suggestions that I get some real speakers for my phone. It ain't the speaker, folks; that's pretty much the best quality I can discern with my own ears. When it comes to music, I think people pay far too much attention to audiophile opinions, and perhaps not enough to those who have physiological limitations on their enjoyment of music and/or recognition of speech-frequency sounds. But yeah, even I could tell when someone used a crappy encoder on their MP3 files. That's why I always ripped my own CDs, or specifically sought out lossless-encoded files, so that I could then use LAME to get an acceptable and consistent level of crappiness. Even now, I only download FLAC, and transcode my own MP3s for portable devices.