Following the great history of GNU naming, LAME originally stood for
LAME Ain't an Mp3 Encoder. LAME started life as a GPL'd patch against
the dist10 ISO demonstration source, and thus was incapable of
producing an mp3 stream or even being compiled by itself. But in May
2000, the last remnants of the ISO source code were replaced, and now
LAME is the source code for a fully GPL'd MP3 encoder, with speed and
quality to rival all commercial competitors.

LAME is an educational tool to be used for learning about MP3
encoding. The goal of the LAME project is to use the open source model
to improve the psycho acoustics, noise shaping and speed of
MP3. Another goal of the LAME project is to use these improvements for
the basis of a patent free audio compression codec for the GNU
project.